Wisdom Masters Press Newsletter

In today's world, truth has become so obscure and falsehood so widespread that, unless we love and
actively seek the truth, we cannot know it. This is an age of media when the lie has been made dogma,
when supression is a sanctified virtue, and evasion a sacrament. It is the age of words but the words
no longer have meaning, they have been subverted into absurdities. We believe that truth is profoundly
important and absolutely essential, and no argument or excuse or deception, no matter how deeply believed,
can ever replace it. This section of our newsletter is dedicated to that proposition.   —M.G. Hawking

"The object of life is not to be on the side of either the majority or the minority,
but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."  —Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180)

•  Media Reporting vs. Facts:  Skeptical? I found so many instances of categorically false reporting during my research that I could literally write dozens of pages of examples of how the corporate media has become this country's "vox mendacium" ("voice of lies"). Really, much of their reporting has become utterly devoid of reality. To illustrate this, I wanted to provide at least ten examples, but Michael limited me to just four, based on the legal principle, "Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus," a Latin phrase meaning "false in one thing, false in everything." So here are just some examples of actual, verified facts versus media stories that clearly reveal the extent of the media's corruption and complete contempt for the public's intelligence.

                1. A Definitive Essay     2. America Unites     3. Heat Wave Facts     4. Problems in Climate Science

I recognize that in today's world there are many people who care more for agendas and ideologies than realities, and those who belittle, ignore or refuse to believe any truth that contradicts convictions they have chosen or have been impelled or coerced to believe. So, I will open with a cautionary note by remembering the wise observations of two brilliant minds.

By Michael:  In a recent brazen tome, The Atlantic Magazine—complete with a title so maudlin it nearly preempts mockery—has gifted us with a climate catastrophe tale so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so demonstrably false, and so shameless that one is almost astonished that they dared. "Climate Crisis Extreme Weather Events Generating Record Death Tolls Worldwide" screams the headline. This is not journalism.
     The Atlantic's own sacraments apparently involved searching for the most grotesque fear-mongering—something so bloodcurdling it would gut all happiness from children and cause the elderly to despair of enduring—so you may forgive them if their search, in failing to find facts, ultimately led them up their own asses. Not unexpectedly, what they did not find in that darkness was any resemblance of reality.
     The actual reality—the truth—reveals one of the greatest accomplishments of modern civilization: Comprehensive analysis from the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Center, The Global Change Data Lab, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows a dramatic decrease in the global annual death rate from all climate related events (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, landslides, extreme temperatures) over the last century. Deaths have fallen from a high of 0.61 per 100,000 people in the 1920s, when records begin, to 0.04 per 100,000 people in the 2010s, a decrease of 93.4%. The data for 2020 indicates a further drop to an estimated 0.031 per 100,000 people, an average decrease in climate related deaths of 22.5% from the decade of 2010 to 2019.
     And the International Disaster Center, Global Change Data Lab, and Institute for Health Metrics released this report on 24 July 2023:  "For 2022, the data is complete and shows a 98.7% reduction in the number of deaths from climate-related events over the period of the last 100 years. Additionally, 2022 shows a reduction of 58.8% in climate-related deaths from the year 2020."      
     Sources: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters), Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium;  The Global Change Data Lab, a co-operative organization of University College London, University of Oxford, and the University of Bristol, England, UK;  and The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Population Health Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
     NOTE: For more information and a very revealing chart from 'Our World in Data' please see Section 4 of "Examples
     of Climate Change Disinformation" titled "Deaths resulting from climate change influenced events" (new window).

It is important to understand that this kind of “reporting” requires the The Atlantic Magazine—and they're scarcely the only one—to make four critical decisions:
          1) To abandon every standard of professional journalism;
          2) To reject well-proven facts and reality in favor of a purely political-agenda-driven narrative;
          3) To fully renounce all ethical responsibility to be truthful with their readers;
          4) To willfully and intentionally compose, publish, and/or otherwise publicize wholly false propaganda.
•    Despite the Atlantic's story being intellectually imbecilic, it stands as a sort of accomplishment in conjuring up deranged hallucinations of the world to fit their "woke" ideology and serve their preening virtue-signaling and self-aggrandizement. Preferring delusional nonsense to the study of reality itself, it manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s horror tale with near unreadable feats of lies and convolution, with a low cunning that passes for intelligence.
•    But why? A brief look at an interview with the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, will provide some insight. The interviewer, a Stanford media researcher, described it as follows:
     Throughout our conversation, Goldberg conveyed his concept of journalism as, quote, "A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians continuously at work adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions."
     Goldberg described his work with The Atlantic as a response to what he called a “transhistoric concern”: "The requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes and voting behavior of the general population. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in molding society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an essential part of the true ruling power of our country. We pull the wires which control the public mind, harnessing old social forces and contriving new ways to control the outcome of elections."
     Such complete immersion in blind arrogance, immorality, and egoistic illusions of elitist supremacy ventures well into the realm of the sociopathic, yet it fully exposes the attitudes underlying the agenda of the left's media apparatus and their maniacal focus on upholding utterly false narratives at all costs, reality be damned.
•    This approach to "journalism" has not been without consequences. Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs (the widow of former Apple Inc. chairman and CEO Steve Jobs) has majority ownership of The Atlantic Magazine. According to a report from NBC News, the magazine lost a whopping $20 million in 2022, and another $16 million in 2023. The magazine is dealing with a declining subscription base as readers realize it creates stories that are later exposed to have been fabrications or hoaxes. But major donors on the “woke-left” such as Laurene Jobs apparently consider these losses a remarkably low price to pay for their all-too-often successful endeavor to control the outcome of elections. The Atlantic doesn’t exist to put out journalism but to create and control narratives. And even with the sharply declining quality of its "journalism", a sufficiently malicious or simply gullible "woke" media establishment is more than happy to lap it up and spread the propaganda around in a process sociologists and psychologists call ‘propagandic convergence.’
•    According to Stanford researchers, here's how propagandic convergence operates: A narrative is fabricated by a malevolent actor to further a political agenda, then circulated to various media newsrooms. Initially, knowing it contains wholly false information, no media outlet is willing to base a story on it. However, on occasion, often motivated by an event that could relate to the fictitious narrative—wildfire, flood, drought, hurricane, etc—one news producer will decide to publicize the story. That decision is often based on a risk/reward analysis imagining that the political benefit of the story is worth the risk of it being exposed as fabricated, and/or the perception that its readers/viewers are too unsophisticated to realize the story is false, or simply based on the old adage "never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."
     Once it's published by a "news" organization like The Atlantic Magazine, The New York Times, or similar media, other news producers feel justified in running the story as well. When that occurs, often literally within 24 hours, the same fabricated story—with slightly modified headlines—will appear in numerous other publications, on television news shows, websites and so forth, completing the cycle of convergence of pure propaganda across the media spectrum.
•    Here are a few examples of the same blatantly dishonest reporting from some of the media outlets who specialize in it:  "Extreme Weather Events Taking An Unprecedented Toll on Human Life" (CNN);  "Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather Events Having Deadly Consequences" (MSNBC);  "Huge Death Toll From Extreme Weather Disasters" (The Washington Post);  "Climate Change Causing All-Time Record Number of Deaths From Weather Disasters" (The New York Times);  "Extreme Weather from Climate Change Increased Deaths by 68% in Populations Worldwide" (The Associated Press).
•    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. This adage agreeably adorns the tale and nicely points the moral:  Never dwell solely on a monomaniacal ideology. Those that do become intensely myopic. It is as if a person, always shut in a room with one small window through which nearby surroundings can be seen, believes that all the things he sees belong to that window, and all things not seen do not exist.  (Adage from George Bernard Shaw.)
•                          And so, the first and only law of the majority of the media's reporting has become this:
                                         There are no lies too big, and no such thing as rock bottom.
     That once respected media organizations—and certain politicians—are now deeply invested in spreading baseless fabrications, viciously slandering political opponents, and relentless fear-mongering, reveals a lot about what they hope to gain, or believe they stand to lose. Whatever the brilliance of the professional disinformation architects within the media and political speech writers, the nature of their work inevitably places them in an indefensible position in the contemporary debate about partisan propaganda, truth in reporting, objectivity, and public awareness.
     Yet, no matter how dedicated to deception they may be, they will never succeed in their effort to dethrone facts. Of course, reality cannot be fooled. Truth will always validate truth as the first principle of the Universe—what else can it do?

2.  An Inspirational Article by Kimberly - America Unites!   The last several years have obviously been pretty rough—economically, politically, culturally, just about every way you can think of. It’s had a huge impact on Americans in every walk of life, in every state, in every city, and at every income level. And that explains the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
     You may not have heard this, but an November 26th survey of focus groups nationwide showed a whopping 8 out of 10 Americans (84%) said the quality of life in the U.S. is "rapidly declining," a new Gallup poll showed 6 out of 10 Americans (63%) described the crime problem in the U.S. as either "very serious" or "extremely serious," about three quarters of Americans (73%) said they are "dissatisfied with the state of public education," a Monmouth University poll showed nearly 9 out of 10 Americans (88%) said “the country is headed in the wrong direction," and a Gallup poll revealed that only 23% of Americans had "confidence in the Biden presidency," the lowest poll numbers for a presidential administration in polling history. What factors were driving this overwhelming discontent?
     When the Biden-Harris administration was inaugurated in January 2021, the inflation rate was 1.4%. Just 16 months later, their policies resulted in the year-over-year inflation rate reaching 9.1%, the highest in over 40 years. This created a cascade of detrimental results. The USDA reports that food prices are up over 30% from 2020, outpacing overall inflation of 20%, and a record 49 million people in the U.S.—including 16 million children—now cannot afford adequate food. The average family has to spend $925 more each month than they did in 2020—over $11,000 more a year—and an estimated 39% of American families are now unable to pay their bills.
     A Harvard study shows housing in our country is now unaffordable for a record 22.4 million people, and over 50% of all renters. The National Association of Realtors reports that the average price of a home is now $426,900, up over 73% from the 2020 average! Homelessness has reached a record high, with more than 772,000 people living in shelters or outside, up a stunning 39% from 2020. KBB reports that car and truck repossessions are up by 52% from 2020, and up 23% from last year.
     Energy prices are up an average of 70% since 2020. As of the end of August, Americans owe a stunning $220 billion in medical debt, up a staggering 70% from 2020. And a recent study reveals that inflation is putting "over 50 percent of retirees at risk of running out of money," as "rising prices require bigger withdrawals from retirement savings," said The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 14.1% of adults aged 65 and older now live in poverty, an increase of 50% since 2020, meaning about 8 million older adults now live below the poverty line. On August 20, the New York Fed reported that more than 28% of Americans are searching for jobs—the highest rate in a decade.
     According to Homeland Security documents recently sent to Congress, as of September 1st the U.S. has more than
10 million illegal aliens in the country who have either been released into the nation’s interior or evaded the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since January 2021—more than the individual population of 36 of our U.S. states! Thousands were pouring in each day, and the Biden administration refused to remove over 98% of those illegals. Only an estimated 22,000 have been in detention facilities. On what officials term the 'non-detained docket,' the vast majority are now free in cities and towns across the country, including over 2 million 'high-priority' cases of illegal aliens who have known criminal records, who are known career criminals, who have pending criminal charges in their home country, or who are known to have been associated with or have connections to active terrorist organizations.
     Historically unprecedented quantities of deadly drugs are flowing across the border. Customs and Border Protection reports that an estimated 4500 to 5000 Mexican cartel tenientes (lieutenants) with their sicarios (enforcers/hitmen) have penetrated into the U.S., responsible for setting-up sex trafficking and drug trafficking operations in cities and towns nationwide, resulting in a massive increase in overdose deaths, with over 112,000 Americans dying in 2023 alone.
     A new NBC poll showed 3 out of 4 Americans (76%) said they “do not feel confident” that life for their children will be better than it has been for them. That’s a shocking 81% increase in “no confidence” from the same poll in January 2020. In many ways, the core belief that today’s children will be better off than their parents is the foundation of “The American Dream.” It's appalling to see that dream dying so quickly.
•   Analysis of polling place exit polls nationwide reveals that people remembered and often discussed what the county was like just a few years ago. This includes facts that are literally kryptonite to the media, things they never mention. For example, the success of the previous administration in controlling the influx of illegal aliens. Statistical data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that both border encounters and successful illegal entries in 2019 were at the lowest numbers in 56 years, since 1963, and in 2020 were at the lowest numbers in 58 years, since 1962.
     Most importantly, voters remembered what the economy was like. In 2019 and early 2020, inflation was 1.6 percent, the lowest it had been in 50 years; mortgage interest rates were around 3 percent; median family income had reached the highest level in U.S. history; unemployment was the lowest in half-a-century; unemployment for women and minorities was the lowest in history; the poverty rate was at the lowest level in over three decades; the country had achieved energy independence, and in April 2020 the average price of regular gas was $1.94 a gallon.
     Moreover, in early 2020 the Consumer Confidence Index was at an historic high and Americans’ average FICO credit score had reached an all-time high, according to Ethan Dornhelm, FICO's vice president for analytics, who attributed the record high average credit score to what was "the best economy in many generations." "Record wage growth and record high income minimized reliance on debt to pay the bills, and the low-wage and middle-wage sectors grew the most by far," Dornhelm said, adding, "This was welcome news and yet another sign that the economy was working for more people than ever before." The economy was working for more people than ever before. That was then. And now?
•   "Now is the winter of our discontent," wrote Shakespeare in the famous opening line of Richard III. This applies very well to our present times as it created a powerful motive for change. I spoke to several scholars in the fields of political science and sociology, all of whom expressed essentially the same observation, that America has entered a phase resembling a “late-stage republic.” What this means is that civilizations have a “life-cycle”—they are born, they go through various stages of development, and they mature to flourish during the “main sequence” of their existence.
     Yet, if their founding principles and values are allowed to be corrupted, they begin to erode, leading to the type of moral degeneration, decline of personal liberty and safety, economic strife and societal deterioration now impacting much of our country. The United States, they say, is suffering from “political malfeasance and corruption, a highly partisan media, an uncontrolled influx of illegal migrants, a growing failure to enforce essential laws, and the failure to reverse destabilizing levels of cultural conflict.” Civilizations which decay like this, if it goes unchecked, eventually collapse, generally devolving into authoritarian rule, or a structure of “statism,” or disappear from history altogether.
    In the 2024 presidential election, the majority of Americans united to defy the cynicism and propaganda that autocrats, power-hungry politicians and the mainstream media attempted to utilize to manipulate voters' opinions. Clearly, people did not buy into the absurd lies and outrageous slandering of the former president coming from the media, certain politicians, and so many political ads.
    The damage that has been inflicted on America in recent years can be reversed. It will not be an easy or quick process, much of the corruption will take years to repair, but it can be done. This process has now begun thanks to voters who leveraged their discontent to put aside differences and biases and worked together to save our country by restoring freedom, the rule of law, equal application of justice, by supporting and protecting the U.S. Constitution, and by assuring that government obeys the will of the people rather than the other way around.
•   Our focus must be on reestablishing the fundamental values on which our country was built. Patriotism and Unity. Freedom and Self-reliance. Respect for Truth. Courage, Strength and Optimism. Community and Family. Fairness, Equality and Justice.
    This is profoundly important because the abject failures of the Biden administration must not now or ever be observed with detachment—it is extremely dangerous for the stability and future of our country, and we would all be wise to remember this warning from President Abraham Lincoln: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves from within."
•   If things had gone the other way, if owing to biases, prejudices, and blind adherence to destructive ideologies, voters had failed to work together to demand and accomplish a restoration of America—and a complete renewal of its values—it would have been another matter. It would have marked the beginning of a new story—the story of ever more rapid decline of our country, the story of its continuing deterioration, of its passing from one world into another, of the initiation of Americans into a far different life than in past decades. That would have been a strikingly different life, one that would have marked the end of how we once lived with liberty, freedom, justice, opportunity, and prosperity.

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3.  Heat Waves - Historical Facts, by Ashley, and Please Note: Lest anyone misinterpret it, the purpose of the following sections is not to suggest that climate change is not occurring—it definitely is—but rather to provide information and data from top professionals and research centers which can assist in understanding facts that have been suppressed by the corporate media and by social media platforms.
•    According to CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS, the Associated Press, and many other media organizations, in 2024 "more than 1,200 daytime high temperature 'records' have been broken," and that temperatures were "unprecedented," and "the hottest in history,” and so on and so on. And that's not all.
     'The Washington Post' claimed that temperatures were "the warmest in the last 100,000 years." CNN decided to one-up them by claiming that the temperatures were "the hottest in 120,000 years," and 'The Hill' said the same. But most amazing, 'CBS Saturday Morning' plowed through every professional and ethical guardrail by claiming that recent temperatures have been—Ready? Don't be too sure—"the hottest in three million years."
     These claims, when taken along with their sources, raise more red flags than a Chinese military parade. So, I talked to several climate researchers, including a nice couple who are friends and neighbors and are both atmospheric scientists. I asked them if such reporting could be true. They said it depends on the "time frame" of the claims of "record breaking" temperatures. Regarding records, it's important to point out the obvious: Record-setting temperatures are relative to the time period of actual recorded thermometer measurements. For example, NOAA uses 1895 as the earliest year with sufficient data with which to compare to recent years. As an obvious result, the claims of the hottest temperatures in "100,000 years," or "120,000 years," or "three million years" are nothing more than a few deranged pantomimes in the theater of the absurd that is today's legacy media. So, lacking direct records that go back more than a hundred years or so, what do we know about past temperatures? Insights come from proxy records and extant, written historical records.
•    On a long-term basis, the best overview of our planet's atmospheric temperature trend is derived from the “Marine Stable Isotope Record.” The oceans absorb most of the world's heat, so there's a direct correlation between deep ocean temperatures and global average surface temperatures. As a result, one of the most widely used proxies for determining global mean surface temperature through the past millions of years is the stable isotope record. The stable isotopes of oxygen are utilized to construct paleoclimatic reconstructions of deep ocean temperatures, as shown in this chart which I was provided by the American Geophysical Union, extending back about 67 million years. Note the steady decline since the Eocene epoch, when ocean temperatures averaged about 22.6 degrees Celsius higher than today, then a leveling off in the Oligocene and early-Miocene epochs, when ocean temperatures averaged about 14.1 degrees Celsius higher than today, then the resumption of a steep decline in ocean temperature, leading to the much lower range toward our modern times in the early-Holocene epoch.
• Per the CBS claim: "Three million" years ago deep ocean temperatures averaged 7-8+ degrees Celsius higher than today,
   meaning that average global atmospheric temperatures were about 10-12 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in 2023 or 2024.
   A data analyst from the Geophysical Union told me that, at minimum, at least 700 million days during the last 3 million years
   were definitely much hotter than in recent years. (How did CBS decide to make such a ludicrous claim? Were they drunk?)

     The climatologists I spoke to also suggested that I talk to historians about the written historical records of extreme temperature events. So Heather and I called and spoke to professors at our alma mater, Oxford University, who were very helpful, and they in turn put us in contact with professors at Cambridge University and Yale University. We were provided with a great deal of information found in literature from parts of the world which have had written languages for thousands of years. I'm including a brief overview below. Again, this information is not meant to indicate that climate change is not occurring, but rather to show that there is much more to the story than what's reported by the media.
•    Note:  Each of the following quotes comes directly from a reliable historical source and had to be confirmed by at least
                 two (2) additional credible sources to be included, and in most cases is recorded in dozens of historical records.
•  "In 627, the heat across the continent [Europe] was so great that all springs dried up; water became so scarce that thousands
    of human beings died of thirst."
•  "In 879, work in the field had to be given up; agricultural laborers persisting in their work were struck down in a few minutes,
    so powerful was the sun."
•  "In 993, the sun’s rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire. Nuts on the trees were roasted,
    as if in a baker’s oven."
•  "In 1000, rivers throughout the continent ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left drying in heaps and putrefied
    in a few hours."  NOTE: Rivers running dry "throughout the continent" has never occurred in contemporary history.
•  "In 1014 in France, and even in Switzerland, all the brooks and the rivers were dried up."  NOTE: ditto to the above.
•  "In the summer of 1022, men and animals venturing in the sun fell down dying."
•  "In 1132, rivers dried up, and the ground cracked and became baked to the hardness of stone. The Rhine in Alsace dried up."
•  "Italy was visited with terrific heat in 1189; vegetation and plants were burned up; thousands of souls perished."
•  "During the battle of Bela, in 1200, there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons; men fell down sunstruck in
    regular rows."
•  "The sun of 1277 was severe; there was an absolute dearth of forage as the fields and forests were scorched and died."
•  "In 1303 and 1304, the Rhine, Loire and Seine ran dry."  NOTE: Neither the Loire nor the Seine have ever run dry in
    contemporary history, and they have been running normally during the recent heat waves.
•  "In 1393 and 1394, great numbers of animals fell dead in the heat, and the crops were scorched up."
•  "In 1538 and 1539, all the rivers across the continent were entirely dried up."  NOTE: Again, that has never happened in
    contemporary history, not even close.
•  "England and Scotland suffered extreme heat in 1625; men and beasts died in scores. Meat could be cooked by merely
    exposing it to the sun. Not a soul dared to venture outside during the day."
•  "In 1718, extreme heat forced London shops to be closed; the theaters were never opened for several months. Not a drop
    of water fell during six months."
•  "In 1753, in London the thermometer rose to one hundred and eighteen degrees."  NOTE: The media claimed the "record
    high temperature" recently set in London was 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit, fully 13° lower than in 1753. (The Fahrenheit
    measurement scale was first introduced in 1724 by the German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit.)
•  "In 1779, the heat at Bologna reached one hundred and twenty degrees; it was so great that a large number of people died."
    NOTE: The media claimed the all-time "record" recently set in Bologna was 103.0 degrees Fahrenheit, which was at
    minimum 17° lower than in 1779.
•  "In July, 1793, the heat became intolerable. Vegetables were burned up and fruit dried upon the trees. The furniture
    and woodwork in dwelling-houses cracked and split up; meat became bad in an hour."
•  "In Paris in 1846, the thermometer marked one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the shade."  NOTE: The media claimed
    the all-time "record" recently set in Paris was 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which was at least 16° lower than in 1846.
Sources: The University of Oxford History Department, Oxford, UK;  The Joint Centre for History, Magdalene College and King's College, Cambridge, UK;  and Yale University Department of History, New Haven, CT.
Clearly, the summer heat waves, although significant, are hardly unprecedented, and much worse heat waves have occurred in the past. So why did climate specialists refer us to historians for the truth on "record" temperatures? Simply because historians have been "overlooked," so to say, and have not (yet) been subjected to serious political pressure or threats to cutoff funding to force them and/or their departments to hide or falsify facts contained in historical records.
●  Temperature Records in the United States: Native Americans have lived on the North American continent for millennia, but unfortunately had no formal written language, and the many things the arriving Europeans subjected them to did not include inquiries as to past climate events. So, until many years after the arrival of European colonists from Spain, Portugal and Britain, there are no written records to identify heat waves on the North American continent similar to or exceeding the heat waves that occurred on the European continent. However, climatologists say that many of the same type of extreme heat events that are documented to have occurred in Europe from the 600s and onward would have happened in the U.S. as well, which is confirmed by substantial evidence derived from proxies such as pollens, tree rings, diatoms, forams, and so on.                 

4.

  •  Summary, by  Ashley:  Please take a moment to consider what these examples really mean, and there are dozens more. Such massive breaches of journalistic integrity are exactly what corruption looks like. Rather than basing their reporting on any investigation into the facts, the news directors, hosts or anchors simply made-up those stories. They fabricated their reporting, not just without any regard for the actual facts, but in direct opposition to the actual facts.
     If you were under the impression that the corporate media is objective, unbiased and report "just the facts" or are "the most trusted name in news," then their behavior should disabuse you of that notion. The social contract between journalist and news consumer—“What I am telling you strictly happened”—has been overruled in that they are incentivized to place all of their observations and reportage into a wholly politicized narrative about "This is what I want it to mean" rather than "This is what really happened." We know that many of these journalists have a well-proved habit of fabricating their reporting. That's been demonstrated over and over again, day after day, week after week.
     NBC News anchor Lester Holt recently gave a monologue on why objectivity, balance or “fairness” in journalism is “overrated.”  "I think it’s become clearer that fairness is overrated," Holt said. "The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in."
     Such a statement, coming from an allegedly objective news reporter, is shocking. (I think it's what Darth Vader said just before he started building the Death Star.) The NBC anchor’s embrace of outright censorship surely ought to outrage any constitutionally-minded and honest American. Holt's words align with a frightening sentiment that the views of anyone who does not agree with or challenges the media's far-left political agenda—in other words, over half of the country—must be muzzled at all costs.
    The corporate media's "news" divisions, in rebelling against the bridle of all professional standards, have integrated partisan propaganda into so much of their political reporting that it has diminished many of our quintessential human capacities, such as intelligence, logic and reason. When coupled with the social media platforms' overt censorship of free speech, it has overall made today's media little more than a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
     The danger of this is clear, as very well expressed by the senior judge of the Washington D.C. Federal Circuit Court: "It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news," wrote Judge Silberman in a libel case. "It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy. It may even give rise to countervailing extremism."
     I feel like I need to get 'Born Free' as my ringtone. I remember taking a course at Oxford optimistically called “Literary Journalism,” which makes me wince for a few reasons. First among them is how we were exposed to a wide range of famous journalists, without our professor discussing the fact that much of their work was substantially fabricated. For weeks, I’d sit there thinking, “This is incredibly revealing material, how did they get it?,” without my earnest young mind considering that it was probably not as conveniently real as depicted, and that “they just made it up” to support their political party and its “talking points” was a strong probability instead of a cynical interpretation.                                                     

•  A Critical Crossroads for the U.S., by Heather:  The ongoing crisis in the media has raised alarm for many of the closest international allies of the U.S. who, with the sober, objective analysis allowed by distance, have become increasingly concerned. I'm from Oxfordshire, I have family members in the intelligence sector, and one of them alerted me to a classified study conducted in the U.K. A private symposium composed of high-ranking members of the intelligence and academic communities reached several stunning conclusions regarding the current state of the U.S. media. The critical summary section of their report reads in pertinent part:
     "The majority of America’s principal broadcast and print media organizations have explicitly abandoned the fundamental standards of journalism. Our research found profoundly troubling aspects of political reporting and information suppression, essentially eviscerating truth and freedom of speech...  The manner in which this developed and the propaganda techniques they now commonly utilize have as their closest historical parallel the practices employed in 1930s Germany by Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Should these dire conditions go uncorrected and a free press not be restored, there is a real question of whether the constitutional republic of the United States will endure."  —United Kingdom MOD Report (Ministry of Defense, sensu lato document), Oxford Brookes (2021)

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."  —Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

• NOTE:  At our last party, I asked a UC Berkeley media analyst why a really liberal newspaper like 'The Washington Post' would write the sharp criticism of CNN and MSNBC that they did. In light of The Washington Post being projected to lose around $100 million in 2023, he said that it has to do with maintaining some degree of credibility, and explained, quote:
     "CNN and MSNBC are not legitimate news sources and most everyone recognizes that. I don't know anyone who takes them seriously, and certainly no one should. Factual accuracy has nothing to do with their stories, facts are typically obstacles to the intended impact of their reporting, so they consider them to be irrelevant. They're not journalists, they're activists, they're fabulists and storytellers.
     "This is not an 'interpretation' of the current state of the U.S. media, any more than dinosaurs are an 'interpretation' of the fossil record. It is simply what CNN and MSNBC have become, and to a significant extent NBC, CBS and ABC also. It helps to understand that we've arrived at a time when nearly every member of the corporate media is a far-left partisan. [Short laugh...] Ashley, if they weren't media figures, they'd be considered nothing more than a radical fringe of the hard-left. With a mix of their own social and occupational homophily and progressive ideology, they view the world through the most distorted lens imaginable. Rather than acting with professionalism, they act on their partisanship by using distortion, fabrication and emotional manipulation as political tools.
     "Truth, objectivity, balance and fairness—everything we work so hard to teach as the invariable standards of professional journalism—have gone completely out the window. The astonishing thing is that it's allowed to continue. In media monitoring and analysis projects across this country, and in most European countries, both CNN and MSNBC are classified as 'Ideological Propaganda Media' and fall in the same category as CCPPD, IRIB, and KCNA."  (CCPPD is China's state-media, the Central Committee of the Communist Party Publicity Department; IRIB is Iran's state-media, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting; and KCNA is North Korea's state-media, the Korean Central News Agency).   
     Best explanation ever. So obviously, in today's world we must be exceptionally discerning where we get day-to-day news that's actually objective, factual, and complete, so as much of the media persists in their propaganda campaigns, please be very selective about what corporate media, social media or other reports you believe.