Gefälschte Nachrichten

Last week, the German publication Der Spiegel was forced to fire its star performer, when it was revealed he was a fabulist. Claas Relotius had written for the publication for close to a decade. He had been handed several awards by other media organs. His exposure as a serial fabricator was the result of his piece on the small town of Fergus Falls Minnesota, after the 2016 election. The thrust of his story was that rural America voted for Trump, because it is full of xenophobic weirdos and economic losers.

His mistake was to pick on a small town in the age of the internet. The yokels were able to look up the article and compare his version of reality with their own. More important, they could go to a popular platform and post their reactions to his article, so the world could then compare his work to reality. Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, who live in Fergus Falls, posted their analysis of the article on Medium. Eventually, it took over a year, Der Spiegel was forced to address the issue publicly.

In Germany, this is quite a scandal in media circles, because Der Spiegel is like their version of New York Times. That is, it positions itself as the official arbiter of truth, with regards to public morality. They not only decide what is true, they decide which truths can be said. Worse yet for them, they have been bragging about their fact checking for a long time. As a result of this tent pole toppling over, the German media is scrambling to convince everyone that it is an isolated incident, not a system failure.

The amusing bit is the German media is rushing around looking puzzled, as to how the vaunted fact checking system could have failed. After all, the best people are in control of the media. How could the best people have made such basic errors? As is the case in America, whenever these things happen, the media hand-wringing is just a dodge. What really concerns them is how easy it was for two bumpkins from dirt country to sluice out the facts from the fiction in this particular article.

That’s always the thing with these scandals. The media big shots always come off as if they have been insulted about their shenanigans being revealed. In this case, the other major media outfits are rallying to defend Der Spiegel. In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the main stream media, the opposite is always true. They circle the wagons and begin lecturing the hoi polloi about the dangers of questioning the media.

That is the real cause of these scandals. For a long time, the mass media in the West has been a mono-culture. You can’t have a career in the media if you don’t hold all the right opinions. To call the media an echo chamber for the left is to understate the problem. The better analogy is a school of fish. Each individual just reacts to those around him, giving the effect of the school having agency as a whole. What looks like collusion is just the result of a uniformity of mind, experience and social class.

That’s why no one at Der Spiegel, or anywhere else in the German media, noticed the fraudulence of Claas Relotius. He was writing the things his coevals and superiors said at luncheons, cocktail parties and in the office. His story about slack-jawed yokels in the American heartland ticked all the boxes popular with the left-wing cultural outlook. He was not sent there to report on the place. He was sent there to confirm what his employers already knew about Middle American and Trump voters.

This is why Western media is something worse than propaganda. The person hired by the state or hired by the corporate marketing department has self-awareness. They know their job is to polish the apple of their superiors. The tricks they employ to do that are done with a knowledge and forethought. The guy telling the public that his employer, the pesticide company, is deeply concerned about the environment does so knowing full well that no one believes him, including his family.

The media is a different thing. They really believe their own nonsense. They think they are part of a special class of human, a priestly class that not only reports facts to the public, but provides moral instruction. The mass media is so intoxicated by their own self-righteousness, they lack the ability to question their own actions. When Claas Relotius came back from the bush, reporting exactly what his bosses knew was the case, they had no reason to question it. It was too good to check.

92 thoughts on “Gefälschte Nachrichten

  1. Pingback: Industrial Rumpswabbery | The Z Blog

  2. Gross misrepresentations of the US in German media are old hat. David’s Medienkritik, a blog dedicated to exposing anti-American diatribes in German media, had a brilliant take-down of another German journalist’s ignorant, inaccurate, deceitful characterization of the Amis in 2007. Markus Günther: Hypocritical Americans Suppressing Memories of Slavery – Other Injustices.

    German journalist Markus Guenther believes that the United States and its people are hypocrites. Why? Because – according to yet another supreme German media “expert” – the people of the United States conspicuously suppress their own injustices while busily memorializing distant tragedies. In an article entitled “Commemorating and Suppressing,” (that appeared on the Passauer Neue Presse and Maerkische Allgemeine websites as well as in the “Politics” section of the Donauwörther Zeitung,) Guenther argues that, while Americans busily erect monuments to the victims of Communism and virtually everything else, they allegedly refuse to acknowledge the darkest chapters of their own history. He specifically brings up the legacies of slavery and the fate of the Native Americans. As “proof” that Americans are hypocrites, he claims that there is no museum documenting the plight of the Native Americans and no statue dedicated to the victims of slavery in Washington.

    The article goes on to refute the lying, deceitful German. Such as pointing out the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, which escaped the attention of Herr Guenther.

    Though it has been inactive for years, David’s Medienkritik posted on Relotius.SPIEGEL Reporter Fired for Inventing Stories – Some with Anti-American Tilt.

    Well – that paragon of high journalism and integrity – Der Spiegel – beacon of honest, objective, and above-all “expert” reporting on the United States apparently has a problem. One of its reporters has been fired for inventing facts – and actually getting caught doing so….
    Mr. Relotius is perhaps just the most overt of Spiegel liars, caught and sacked for being too brazen in his journalistic malpractice. But make no mistake: The lies of omission, spin and bias that have tainted Der Spiegel and Spiegel Online for decades continue unabated on an industrial scale. Some things never change…

    German media is no more trustworthy than American media.

  3. does remind me of the so-called Scopes “Monkey Trial”
    and the film made about it, ie Inherit the Wind
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherit_the_Wind_(1960_film)

    eg. For example, Scopes is shown being arrested in class, thrown in jail, burned in effigy, and taunted by a fire-snorting preacher. William Jennings Bryan is portrayed as an almost comical fanatic who dramatically dies of a “busted belly” while attempting to deliver his summation in a chaotic courtroom. The townspeople are shown as frenzied, mean-spirited, and ignorant. None of that happened in Dayton, Tennessee during the actual trial

    reality just had to be distorted so that the stereotype confirmed the viewers expectations

    apart from that, it is quite a good film.

  4. This is yet another example of the Progressive ideology that the ends justify the means and any tactic in their war against freedom is both permissible and obligatory. They fight like their lives depended on it and that is their greatest advantage over the rest of humanity. They are playing for keeps and everyone else is marveling at the insanity of that behavior, and hence is underestimating the nature of the threat. Exposure alone is not sufficient, for they will only strive to be more covert in the future.

  5. Another funny thing that the so called “Dissident-Right” fails to mention, the race and gender of these lying cretin. Claas whatshisname is a white male just like Philip Bump, Anderson Cooper, Tim Russert etc. Heck, if the alt-right types want to know who is the biggest enemy of the white male, look in the damn mirror.

    • You sure are good at pointing out race traitors. Bet you can do it for blacks, too. Good thing you aren’t racist.

    • Look at the cases of Janet Cooke of the Washington Post and Jayson Blair of the NY Times. These heralded black “reporters” admitted to fabricating their most lauded stories. At least the WaPo had the decency to return the tainted Pulitzer it received for the story. All I can remember from the NY Times is a whole lot of hand wringing and explanations for poor, black (and obviously oppressed) Jayson. I even remember jb bragging he got over on his gullible old white employers and readers.

  6. ” It was too good to check.”

    Exactly. Look at the expose in The Medium. The first thing you notice is that no reasonably intelligent child could believe this stuff, assuming they hadn’t spent their whole lives in a leftist echo chamber. The second is that virtually every one of Der Spiegel’s quasi-racist stereotypes of Americans appears like ducks in a row. Americans as religious fanatics? Check! Americans as prudes? Check! Americans as gun nuts? Check! Americans as racist and xenophobic? Check! And the list goes on.

    In addition to claiming how “shocked, shocked” they are that such lies could have escaped the notice of their “layers and layers of editors and fact checkers,” Spiegel’s editors have now concocted the fairy tale that the whole affair was exposed by an in-house Sherlock Holmes by the name of Juan Moreno. In other words, the system is “self-correcting.” This lie was exposed by Jake Krohn of Fergus Falls, who posted a timeline of the affair on Twitter showing that they had alerted Der Spiegel to Relotius’ lies as early as April.

    https://tinyurl.com/ydavta6u

    Meanwhile, the pious editors at Der Spiegel have actually gone so far as to file charges against Relotius for stealing funds donated to help Syrian children! Like the Paris fashions, they face down ridicule.

    https://www.france24.com/en/20181223-spiegel-file-criminal-complaint-against-cheating-reporter

    To his credit, the U.S. Ambassador over there has actually called out Der Spiegel for hypocrisy:

    https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2018/12/22/ambassador-richard-grenell-is-calling-out-der-spiegel-for-its-anti-american-bias-fake-news/

    I don’t doubt that most of the German people are perfectly ready to swallow Der Spiegel’s thigh slappers. The MSM over there is under the virtually complete control of the Left, They’ve been fed this stuff for decades, and they have no equivalent of talk radio, influential conservatives bloggers, news outlets like Fox that will occasionally contradict the narrative, etc. Only a few minor bloggers dare to push back, and are routinely denounced as “extreme right wing” and, of course, “Nazis” for their trouble. In spite of that, many Germans seriously believe that “freedom of the press” there is a shining example for the rest of the world, and that they know way, way more about Amerika than the Americans themselves.

    • Germans just fucking suck cock. The worst fucking people on the planet. Maybe even worse than New York Jews.

    • By lucky happenstance had dinner last night with a journalist friend who works for “B”. Old school financial investigative guy, you’ve seen him on the cable shows. Few observations on his part. Editors have been wiped out over the last two decades…and they are the real frontline against this crap. Second, all you had to do was look at this guy’s history of getting “big” stories…way too many, way too fast. The number of these you get in a career, even for the best reporters is limited..almost a law of physics. Though usually war corros are the most guilty, since the stories can’t be easily corroborated. Third, this goes on a lot more than you ever see among the 20-30 something reporting crowd. But usually the publications quietly disappear them to a shallow unmarked journalistic grave and never acknowledge the falsehoods. And it is getting exponentially worse since there are simply no adults left in the newsrooms.

  7. They’ve been doing this for decades. Check out this “Award winning documentary” narrated by Charles Kuralt from 1966 called “16 In Webster Groves”. They make the teenagers in this all white middle class suburb of St. Louis look like children of the corn.

    https://vimeo.com/12658300

  8. “In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the main stream media, the opposite is always true. They circle the wagons and begin lecturing the hoi polloi about the dangers of questioning the media.”

    This is a fantastic point, easily overlooked but very telling about the media.

  9. “Saturday Night Fever” the movie was based on a NY Times article that purported to describe the “tribal” aspects of the denizens of NYC’s club dancing scene. Nik Cohn, the author of the article, later admitted it was totally fabricated. One can also go even farther back in time to find similar deliberate attempts to use the press to sell a factual untrue version of events, e.g. the articles in the “New York World” and other publications of 1890s. Those articles were written and published with the clear (and within the press acknowledged) intent to shape public opinion on various political issues, most prominently being the push for America to intervene in the Cuban insurrection by going to war with Spain in 1898. Nothing knew here. In fact, the whole reason d’être for “journalistic ethics” was a recognition of the power of the press and the ease with which they could sell false stories.

  10. In the 80’s I worked at the CIA with a guy who was cover CIA in Vietnam in the mid to late 60’s. He spent every weekend drinking in a Saigon bar with the Time magazine correspondent who wrote the articles with the weekly body count of enemy killed. One week the body count was the number of toothpicks in the jar on the bar. Another week it was the number of peanuts in the bowl. One time it was the number of roses on the wallpaper. The stories were completely fabricated (but plausible).

    Another fake news story from this buddy was the eye witness report of U-2 flights in the 70’s from Crete. He ran the flight line for this mission to monitor the Israel-Egypt border. The flights weren’t from Crete but it seemed plausible so the “eye witness’ report was run and the CIA wasn’t about to correct it.

    As long as the “report” tells the right story pleasing the editors and readers then all’s good.

  11. I’m surprised they acknowledged a problem existed at all.

    When it comes to these “scandals”, I’m going to go one step further and suggest that they know that what gets submitted is partially to mostly BS but they print it anyway because they are almost all advocacy journalists where the ends justify the means. If it means smearing a small town or a large demographic of people, all they care about is that it fits whatever narrative they need or want to push. I don’t think most of these journalists are capable of writing a story that they can’t tie back to social justice or why white men are evil.

  12. I have German “friends” who are trust funders of a media company. My God! They are completely clueless about life outside of Beverly Hills or Manhattan. And their children are the worst brats God ever made.

  13. “In the dreaded private sector, competitors are always quick to take advantage of the mistakes of a competitor. In the main stream media, the opposite is always true.”

    This is a great point. If media outlets were really committed to the truth, they’d be delighted outreport and correct rival outlets. They have every incentive. They occasionally fact-check a friendly politician, but never an ideologically-aligned media ally.

    • This is true of many professions. Look at law and medicine. The guys in them realize that it’s a good racket and they don’t want it screwed up. They have to keep Dorothy from looking behind the curtain. She might see something too shocking to bear. That’s largely why the public goes along with this, too.

    • They probably new all along. They only admit it when the realise everyone have read about it on the Webb anyway. The competitors can’t take advantage of it because their staff behave like loyal members of the same guild.

  14. Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight was correct when he referred to the media as one or two steps above prostitution.

  15. Textbook example, how to fight liberals. Pick one of them and hammer him 24/7 until he breaks. Then next.

    • I’m not really seeing the phyzz angle in this case. Looks like pretty typical Germanic.

      We’ve gotta be careful on the whole physiognomy thing. It’s like race and IQ: there are definite correlations, and it’s an area worth studying, but the division fallacy is still a fallacy and it’s not healthy to fall into a monomania.

    • He looks like a creep. I’ve met a few guys who look just like him abd each total d-bags.

      That said if you want to see some real freaks:

      Take a look at the video of the people who produced Star Trek Discovery series:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGt79eTPXk0

      And it also shows the damage four ugly bints can do to a beloved series.

  16. I think rather that this practice of fabulism is endemic. Recall the cases of the early 2000s with Stephen Glass and that other black guy. There are just too many things like that for it not to be true. You know the lion by its claw, scorpion by its sting in this case, the tormentor by his MO.

    I actually have a conspiracy theory about it. There are certain cues which recur in these stories, which I believe these people use to signal each other that they are in fact hoaxing and that this is an acceptable behavior because of the greater good or whatever they believe. Take the UVA thing with Haven Moynihan. One of the points which allowed Steve Sailor to explode the story was the shattering glass table during the rape. Uh, those things are really hard to break actually, and so we have a bunch of naked guys rooting around in glass shards? But the glass table was there for a purpose. It alludes to the Stephen Glass incident “shattered glass” was the name of the movie and the article exploding it. There are many stories from certain liberal outlets which contain various cues like this. For example, a supposed rapist named Patrick Bateman, the name of the villain from American Psycho, which cues high IQ persons that this is fabulism. I don’t want to be too specific for litigious fears.

    Sometimes it will not be complete fabrication, but rather gross mischaracterization of a real incident. For example, a few years back there was a rare white on black murder near here, and a liberal news outlet ran extensive coverage portraying it as a neo Nazi murder, whereas it was really drug related from speaking to people involved with the crime.

    Has anyone else noted this practice of fabulism? I realize it won’t be a hard sell to convince you guys that its happening, but the conspiratorial elements?

    • You don’t need a conspiracy to explain this. MPAI, and journalists are worse than most people. They’ve probably seen a bunch of Hollywood movies showing plate glass windows shattering at the slightest force, and think that’s how things actually work.

      It’s actually very shocking how many people can’t tell the difference between movies and reality, and lots of TV editors/reporters probably fancy themselves movie producers and directors.

      • I know, I know, but it’s a pervasive thing. Sure, there is probably a list of Patrick Batemans on Facebook as well. The weird name Haven too, like he was a haven to her at first. It could be Freudian too. I think it’s a subtle system of cueing ones loyalties.

        • Other things like that. Back in the 80s there were occasional cryptic references to spying by the nsa, as at the end of the movie Sneakers or in the novella by John varley Press Enter. Not recommending that work btw. Fast forward to Edward Snowden and it’s all very much true! Do you think maybe it arises from a rumor mill of smart connected people, or perhaps some weird revelation of the method. There are many uncanny things like this in the media, I’ve come to learn.

        • I was thinking of the old “conspiracy theory” about revelation of the method before I finished reading your post. IIRC, it’s a case of the cloud people rubbing the people’s face in it–the clues are obvious if you’re smart and paying attention but most people miss it. Cloud people have a good laugh over putting the truth in front of people’s faces and getting away with it. Some of this could be a confirmation bias though, and it may not be as common or sinister as it seems, but I think there’s something to it.

          • There is. There really are things like this. There is an elite chess grandmaster valery salov, who was third in the world back in the 80s, who thinks most of elite chess was a rigged, kabbalistic ritual. Most of what he says is kind of kooky. For instance, the Kasparov/anand match in 1995 was played in the World Trade Center. The first game was played on 9/11. On two consecutive games there were rook sacrifices. The word for rook is of course tower in every other language. For those two games, the games were moved to the observation deck, as if to make a point. Uncanny coincidences, but with all the other, it just makes me wonder. We wise understand the connection between Kabbalists and the interests which 9/11 was favorable to.

          • There’s a lot of this going around with regard to 9/11. I can really go down the rabbit hole on this stuff. If I do it for too long I start wondering if Kubrick revealed in 2001 that he faked the moon landing.

            This is probably a troll (Apophenia productions?) but it fits with what your saying. BTTF predicts 9/11.
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ULjJ3EqyY

          • You know, apophenia is the psychological condition of reading patterns into randomness. I started to wonder if I have succumbed to it a little! But with all these hoaxes and strange stuff going on, no wonder!

    • Ever seen a billfish school up baitfish in a tighter and tighter ball in order to slash them to pieces? Might be a lesson there…

  17. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I wonder now how much of what we “knew” to be true wasn’t true at all, there simply were no dissenting views allowed and it was next to impossible to get alternative viewpoints published. People screech, and not without justification, about the chaos of the internet age where anyone can publish anything, but I will take this over the narrowly produced official narrative model of my youth.

    • Remember Mittens lamenting that we don’t just have a few newspapers and TV anchors (all with the same editorial slant masquerading as “objective”) anymore? The ruling class is losing the narrative because there are finally alternate news sources.

      • That’s amusing coming from the son of a man who was a political hatchet man of the GOP whose job it was to kneecap populists and anyone wasn’t in the club from getting too popular.

        • His father was one of the worst liberals this nation ever saw. He left a trail of destruction behind him.

    • I grew up watching Walter Cronkite. I knew there was more to the story than the crap he was dishing up. But how to prove it? Today, we know what those bastards were up to. They were news readers and they read what the producer stuck in front of them.

  18. I like how the Medium story is written by a coastal transplant who’s working diligently to destroy the small community she’s lived in for less than 10 years, complete with the literal phrase “social justice”.

    It’s easy to miss in the context of Der Spiegel’s blatant fabrication, but that’s the real story here. She’s even from Portland. It’s a literal stereotype.

    • The author’s closing at the end of the 11 points has got to be one of the most patronizing bits of prose I’ve read in a while. Along with the typical social justice angle (a true Portland transplant), there was the also-typical “voted against their interests” line. What an asshole.

      I too, am a transplant to a small-ish town in Montana. We came here from Central Oregon, but in addition to wanting to find a place with the natural beauty I loved, I mostly wanted to get away from those Portland-types. I love small-town Montana because most people here share my values, or I share theirs (which is probably the better way to look at it). Like them, I hate when the lefties move here and immediately try to change it. I want to change nothing.

  19. Zman, I think way back you mentioned a book about African journalism, about how fact-gathering English reporters were alarmed by the slick, truth-massaging American journalists. Can you remind us of the title? Thanks.

  20. I thought you were taking off for the Holidays, Z. But FWIW, what we now refer to as the MSM is a propaganda arm of multinational conglomerates. There are few good journalists like Sharyl Attkisson, but they’re pretty much banned from broadcast media.

  21. Ants are simple creatures. In an ant hive, there is no real leader. Some ants are born into specialised roles. The queen is a good example. The Queen doesnt lead or give orders. She has one job..lay eggs. Warriors are another specialised ant. They are literally adapted to fight. But the bulk of the ant population in a hive will be workers, and once they mature they will do whatever they like.

    The thing is, every ant behaves in a predictable manner according to a set of rules and algorithms encoded into them by a hundred million years of natural selection. With enough ants, these simple rules will lead to emergent behaviours, allowing a hive to solve complex tasks in such a way as to suggest a single directing mind is controlling the ants.

    And in a way, there is..but not in the way most people think. There is no elaborate hierarchy involved. The processes of an ant hive simulate how a brain works, with each ant functioning as a neuron using chemicals instead of electrical impulses to communicate. This creates a kind of intelligence that exists above and separate from the ants. And this intelligence can solve problems.

    Our Overlords function like this. There isnt a grand conspiracy..just a bunch of people with a strikingly homogenous set of beliefs and reflexes all communicating with each other and acting in predicable ways. This generates its own simple hivemind effect, with emergent behaviours and problem solving mechanisms.

    But like any mind, this sort-of hivemind (tribemind?) can suffer illnesses, delusions and even senility leading to a growing separation from reality and the subsequent collapse of its proper functioning.

  22. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object. Albert Camus, The Fall

    I say let these so-called elite “journalists” keep lying. By their lies they reveal the sickness at the soul of their “profession” and of the left as a whole.

    Merry Christmas to all.

  23. A little while ago, I read a story written by a journolist who decided that he would go to “Middle America” to find how the people there really felt, thought, lived, etc. Turns out they were all idiots. Also turned out that this clown determined that “Middle America” is a geographic place and so he went to some city (and ‘city” is an important point in this story) in, I think, Illinois or Indiana. Now I could be wrong, but I have always assumed “Middle America” described an ideology and a culture that is nurtured and preserved in small towns and individual citizens spread all across the country and you’re not going to discover its characteristics in St Louis or Cincinnati.
    Middle America is the Tea Party (and the Tea Party is not an organized entity with meetings, dues and elected officers) and Middle America elected Trump. Given the number of people escaping here to Montana, I think Middle America is growing

    • They’re going to Montana to escape the collapse. And many of the escapees are progressives, too.

  24. Clap clap clap clap.

    Post. Of. The. Year!

    But that this is the hell of that: anybody with half a brain should be able to see it. The people consuming that dreck. My boomer mother is an obnoxious, geriatric progressive chitlib and she gets her info from daytime tv and the mass media and she believes it without question. In our last discussion – a political debate she insisted on having, that I desperately had been trying to avoid for years – finally came about. I lost my patience with the old bint and told her that only geriatrics and idiots believe anything the mainstream publishes today – and it was like anathema or blasphemy. My elderly dad brags about how he reads the local rag sheet cover to cover. So he got dragged into it too! I got kicked out of the family will for being a Nazi. It probably cost me a small fortune but I am still laughing about it. Guess it learned me a much needed lesson about guns n’ bibles n’ such. Not only do those people lack the means to question themselves – they have no mercy for others that question or disagree with them either.

    • My dad told me I might not get a Christmas package on time because that evil Trump has been thinking about privatizing the post office. My mom literally cries if you say anything bad about public schools. At some point people are beyond the point of no return.

      • There’s just been massive amounts of brainwashing. I look at the white population and know that the numbers are much much worse than they look. And I’m not talking about saving Western Civilization. I think it’s past saving. This is just survival of white people now. but the elites are out, the underclasses are out, half or more of the middle class is been brainwashed the children are being brainwashed daily by the school system. At the moment, if all the people that thought white people were in danger and worth saving could fill a baseball stadium I’d be surprised.

      • Yeah, my almost 89 year-old mother is a standard silent-era progressive, child/grandchild of immigrants, and I’ve always been the family black sheep who insists on wrongthink. I don’t even bring up politics at all with her – given the state of her hearing and general mental decline, combined with the infrequency of our phone conversations – not hard to avoid. It’s just not worth beating your head against a brick wall, and I have better things to do. Whether there will be any $ left over for me after my parasitic siblings have satisfied their endless desires is a different question entirely.

    • Dear Mr. Filthie…..My sympathies to you, and as tough as that nuclear row was, the albatross has been lifted from your shoulders. Happened to me 20 years ago with the Commie dad disinheriting me for not only thinking politically differently and also for not allowing him to dictate the paths of my life. It was a blessing. I could write a book for all younger people to get through their heads…. do not base your life jumping through hoops waiting for your parents’ money. You never grow up and take command of your own life. You’ll never know what kind of fulfilling life you can really create. Your parents have the right to do anything with their money, and when they reach geologic age they may do really crazy things with their money that will shock you…like giving it all away to the spotted bird society as they like birds better than you. My mother was dying from ALS, my father lost his mind, ran to the arms of the nurse caring for my mother, and gave away all his money. That was the end of that. Human nature in a nutshell and ebook version! And I learned much and moved on to a much better life! And more friends that make up my family. And a good husband! Amenski to that! Am down to 1 leftie friend, we play by the rules by not talking about the obvious, and one day the world will give a godalmighty push and that last leftie friendship will be blown out of the water.

      • I ain’t got a dime, but what I got is mine.
        I ain’t rich, but Lord, I’m free.
        George Strait, Amarillo by Morning

        • I think it boils down to that quip from Z about how they go through life “checking boxes.” To think as we do, question and fact check – that is a lot harder than doing your homework.

          I’ll tell ya something else I suspect – that reporter probably took a bullet for the team. The editors probably wrote the article and sent a peon to gather, assemble or manufacture evidence to support the narrative. When the chit hit the fan, the reporter was there, and he was convenient to blame. I don’t mind seeing some leftist lickspittle getting a much needed kick in the nuts – but it’d be nice to see his bosses getting it too.

  25. You know how when you only see a little nephew once every few years, and he’s grown massively bigger and taller every time you see him? That’s how I feel with the “mainstream” media now. I only check in once every few months, but every time I do, they’re several notches more unhinged. Their bubble is floating away from reality, from sanity, at an alarming rate.

  26. I have read that he was outed by another journalist who worked on an article with him, noted some serious inconsistencies when the piece was published, and then spoke up so he wouldn’t be tarred with the same brush and also go down in flames.

    I can’t find the link but on reflection it might be a put-up where they’re trying to claim that they policed their own.

  27. They’re scared, as I think you’ve pointed out before. Tagesschau, the state-run ARD outfit, has like a tenth of the viewership of some vloggers. And yes, they have double-think and crime-stop down to a science. It’s hilarious to watch them do reports on the rise of “antisemitism” in Germany and attribute it to the NDP and some guys in bars and beer tents, when they know damn well it’s a result of the multicult and muslim immigration. They punish people who notice things very severely in Germany (maybe not as severely as in England or Canada). Look up what they did to Hans-Georg Maaßen for believing his lying eyes in Chemnitz, if you’re not familiar with the case. If you can read German, achgut.com (“Axis of Good”) is the best news site.

    • Yeah, now that there are so many choices on the internet, people are deciding for themselves who they can trust, and it’s sure as hell not the doublethinking “legacy” media.

      • A related anecdote: On the way to the gym this morning I noticed a Subaru with a bumper sticker stating “Mass media breeds ignorance” and, above that and to the left, a large “Beto” sticker. NPC cognitive dissonance in real time.

        • I had no idea what a Beto was.
          I looked it up so you won’t have to
          https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Beto
          Beto’s
          A shitty little hell hole Mexican restaurant chain that serves what seems to be horse meat, cat meat, rats, and carne esada platters. The tacos are unfit for a starving Ethiopian, whereas the burritos are the cause for all of the world’s sin. Eating here will cause you to either piss fire out of your ass or blow the back out of your toilet.

          If you are brave enough, or stupid enough to eat here, make sure you can count in Spanish… as your order number will be read to you in this foreign tongue. With the mariachi style music, the order numbers being called out in Spanish, the lawn mowing and landscaping Mexicans in line with you, the filthy bathrooms, the messy tables, the flies buzzing around the salsa bar, and the stench of human and animal waste… one really gets the sense that he/she is in a different country, or in Miami.

          Stay away from the refried beans and the fish tacos, they will keep you from shitting solid for at least 4 to 5 days after ingesting them.,,

    • I went over to achgut.com and read the story about that Spiegel writer. The first sentence (my translation): “The Axis editors today decided at an unscheduled editorial meeting to launch a prize called ‘The Karl May Prize for Creative Innovative Journalism’ and it will be handed out every year on June 27, the birthday of Konrad Kujau.”

      Karl May was a German writer of corny, pot boiler Westerns published in the late 19th century. And Konrad Kujau was the famous forger and con man who produced the fake Hitler Diaries back in 1983 and subsequently bought by Stern magazine. I was heaving with laughter when I read that sentence above. The German MSM is being shredded.

      • If you want a real laugh look up “The Captain of Kopenick,” the true story of a habitual criminal who got his hands on a secondhand uniform and pretended to be an officer in order to steal some money. Germans were convinced by an ailing monarchy to march to their doom and now they’re being convinced by teenagers (like Manny from France and Justin from Canada) to let the Saracens overrun their walls. I guess the popularity of the May stories is inexplicable to Americans, but I like the old Winnetou and Shatterhand movies, and old Germans still worship the guy. I’ve heard that May’s death certificate lacks a cause, and this is because he committed suicide due to being disgraced when people found out he hadn’t really traveled abroad much before writing his tales. I don’t see what the problem was. Edgar Rice Burroughs never traveled to Mars.

  28. Funny thing about the vast majority of these scandals….all could have been stopped by one or two simple affirmative confirmations. Very similar to my early career days underwriting fidelity bonds for banks. Rarely was a fraud (even the big ones) the result of some sophisticated conspiracy, rather it was something simple like physically verifying the cars in the auto floor plan loan were actually on the lot. Laziness and ideology are a bad combo.

    • So true. Years ago I was involved in a case where employees in the accounting department were systematically skimming cash for years. The employees in question had new cars every year and regularly went on expensive vacations. Management never bothered to ask how it was possible that these people could afford their lifestyle. They were such nice people, why would they steal?

    • It’s even worse than that. When the Jayson Blair story came out, it was revealed that multiple people — including the small-town reporters whose quotes and details Blair was stealing — had long been calling the NYT and telling them their guy wasn’t where he said he was. Not only was the NYT failing to corroborate, they were actively ignoring the evidence of his hoaxes.

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