Back in 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about an alleged rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” story was a bombshell story that became a national controversy. It seemed to confirm everything the Nth-wave feminists were saying about the scourge of white males raping white women on the college campus. All of the usual suspects rushed to the nearest outlet to display their outrage over the incident.
Of course, this later became known as the “Virginia Rape Hoax” as the story was completely fake. The only things about it that were true is the star of the story was a human who attended the university and the writer used her real name. Otherwise, the story was a total fabrication and a ridiculous one at that. Sensible people noticed huge problems with it from the start. The two big clues that it was fake were that it read like a bodice ripper and the villain was named Haven Monahan.
In retrospect, this story was a turning point for mass media. By the old rules, everyone involved would have been shamed out of the public eye. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, would have been drummed out of the profession. Jackie Coakley, the coed who was the fake victim, would have been destroyed by an angry media. Erdely faced no repercussions and still works in the media. Coakley was mostly ignored and has gone on with her life, not having suffered from it.
The news was always biased and lots of reporters fabricated stories to fill up their stories, but there was always risk to being a fabulist. Stephen Glass, the guy who cooked up legendary whoppers while at the New Republic was drummed out of the business and the reputation of the magazine was destroyed. Jayson Blair. the black New York Times reporter was fired for making up stories. Imagine a black reporter being fired today for anything, much less for slandering white people.
Prior to the Rolling Stone story, a reasonable person knew the media was biased toward left-wing causes and left-wing institutions. They would favor the Democrat over the Republican, for example. They would promote left-wing causes and ignore or dismiss right-wing issues. After the Rolling Stone hoax, the prudent person assumes that everything in the media is fake. The question is, what is possibly true and what is the agenda behind the proposed narrative.
In other words, reading the American media has taken on the same quality as reading the Soviet media in the Cold War. You read it like you read any piece of fiction in that you are looking for clues in the narrative to discovery the deeper meaning. Instead of Kremlinologists, Americans have to be regime-ologists. The regime media offers clues about what is going on behind the veil. Those clues help understand the workings of the inner party and what they are plotting.
Take this story in Yahoo News about a high-tension cloak and dagger affair that supposedly happened in Washington during the Trump years. The story has a female heroine named Ali Watkins, who is a strong independent female journalist working for the New York Times. It has a villain, a shady character named Jeffrey Rambo, who worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The two of them engage in a high stakes game of cat and mouse in the capital.
The story seems ridiculous and oddly familiar. The reason for that is it is ripped from the ham-fisted television shows about rogue government agencies. Of course, the main character is described like someone from female fantasy literature. Instead of the villain being named Haven Monahan, he is Jeffrey Rambo. The story does not describe him as having a thick New York accent or dropping from helicopters with a bayonet between his teeth, but you just know it happened!
There are some things about the story that are true, like the names of the two main characters, but the story is most assuredly fake. The first clue the story is made up is that this fantastic story is in Yahoo News, rather than the New York Times where the protagonist works. Instead, it is at a C-list outlet written by a nobody whose prior work was reporting on the FBI. Dumping these stories on nobody reporters is standard practice for the regime. It is part of the subterfuge.
Another clue is the main character. She is not the strong independent female journalist speaking truth to power. She is the tramp who was having sex with James Wolfe, the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. He was busted for giving her information that she used in her stories. She denies it but this is not an issue in dispute, so we can add liar to the morals charges. Watkins at the time was in her mid-20’s and Wolfe was in his late-50’s.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wolfe was the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee for 29 years. This means he was one of a small number of people seeing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence data. In other words, he was a professional spook who knew the game. Most likely, in addition to getting some young flesh ,he was also using Watkins to peddle disinformation. This is not a new game between “young reporters” and old DC hands.
Using our regime-ology skills we quickly see that the drama of the story is mostly fake and intended to get attention. The real story is the FBI is peddling a story to the media that both damages another agency and helps their friendly media. They picked Jana Winter because she has nothing else going on, is desperate for a break and has been a willing stenographer in the past. She will not ask too many questions. Again, this is old hat in the game of media manipulation.
That raises the question as to why this story was planted by the FBI. There is the special prosecutor glacially investigating the Russian collusion hoax and the FBI’s role in promoting it. The Trump people did use the “rogue agency” in question to uncover the Wolfe-Watkins operation. It is possible Durham is using the same assets to investigate the FBI or allies. It could also be another smear job against Trump that will be later used in the campaign against him.
At this point, it is hard to know, but it is good practice in reading the media in order to tease out what is happening behind the veil of secrecy. Given the effort put into writing this whopper, it will come up again at some point. All we can know is there is trouble inside the security operations. One branch is not happy with another and is now taking their war to friendly media. Perhaps soon people will be airbrushed out of official photos, a practice popular in authoritarian regimes.
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At this point, there’s absolutely no reason to believe anything from any media outlet anywhere. Maybe the weather report – maybe.
Ditto for any governmental agency anywhere. We are being so screwed with six days from Sunday, it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep one’s wits together. The Zblog is a huge help. A tiny (but getting larger) lifeboat in a sea of madness.
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a modern monastery. i strongly recommend that everyone here make copies of those western cultural products they want to preserve. and the hardware to access them 🙂
anyone who has seen (or read) Fahrenheit 451 will remember the ending, when people “become” books. people talk about 1984, and Brave New World, but for me, F451 nails this subject much much more effectively .
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I used to say that the weather report was the one thing the media couldn’t make up.
Recently I’ve noticed something odd though. I exercise almost every morning and check the weather forecast nightly to gauge what to wear and adjust my routine. The forecasts even 12 hours forward have become weird and unpredictable.
A couple days ago as an example weather.com was forecasting the morning temp to be 57deg. Apple was forecasting 41deg. Which experience told me was more accurate and it was.
So apparently some places are just making up the weather forecast now too.
Sabrina Erdely, the author of the campus rape hoax, was fired from Rolling Stone and pretty much drummed out of mainstream media, but she had protectors to fall back on:
From Wikipedia:
“As of 2021, Erdely writes for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and co-hosts the Jewish Philly podcast.”
Because of course she does.
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More noticing.
Z is going to be unhappy with all you anti-semites noticing every time.
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Absolute degeneracy. In the past, better people committed lesser crimes and stayed out of the public eye for the rest of their lives.
Just like the old Soviet saying about work in that country, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
With American Pravda it is , they pretend to be serious journalists and we pretend to believe them.
As with the deep state fed outfits formally known as the FBI, CIA and Justice dept, we now have bizzaro world counterparts. Everything done is to subvert the country and what it used to stand for. Sometimes I am forced to watch these old crime show real case files with my wife. One really gets a sense of how much they used to care about doing their duty even putting themselves at somewhat of a physical risk.
Easier to punk Trump supporters and other dissidents. How are those Michigan boys doing, you know, the ones plotting to kidnap Whitmer.
to everyone here, i strongly recommend (as a tonic for these foul times) the tv series: Comrade Detective. It’s available for free on Amazon Prime. the premise is that communist authorities decide to make their version of an american police show, like starsky and hutch. it is hilarious in that the cops are always spouting communist slogans, instead of the usual cop show cliches. don’t go by my description, watch an episode or two for yourself. as a taste, Jordache jeans figure prominently in the plot 🙂
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and you will never get that time back, you invest in decoding the inner party’s workings. would love to see a hypothetical scenario where doing so has any return on the time invested?
don’t disagree with the main premise of the article, though i would expand it a bit and add that besides the intentional lying, is the innate incoherence and irrationality of the inner party.
personally, i think visiting prog sites (including msm) is very damaging to the mental clarity (at a minimum) of the person doing so; much like looking at the face of the Gorgon. i never do it and now *i* am better off for avoiding them. i let other visitors here do it for me, and read their accounts here.
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The sole purpose of visiting the mainstream, regime-approved news orgs is to learn what absolutely, positively isn’t the truth. Whatever they are saying is true can effectively be eliminated from the list of actual true possibilities.
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You have a point about getting a return on efforts to decode the regime. But, not knowing what will happen next, if this regime is about to collapse or is good for another 30 yrs mileage, learning to understand how it thinks and works could suddenly come in handy. Certainly if one wants to build some kind of ‘resistance movement’ or figure how to be left as much alone as possible.
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“learning to understand how it thinks and works” which isn’t knowable, even to those at the top. and what would you do with this knowledge (that you aren’t already doing)?.
watch the two Smiley’s People mini-series for superb examples on this topic; i.e. decoding intent.
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We have the same problem here. The article below is a few years old (2018) but is still relevant given the pathetic and low caliber of people who “identify as journalists” but are nothing more than bloggers and the lowest of fiction writers desperate for attention.
This same sort of nonsense is also showing up more and more in “respected” scientific journals. I recently read that several US universities were intentionally “punked” and even after the hoax was made known, the university never retracted the stories from their publications.
Der Spiegel says top journalist faked stories for years
The German news magazine Der Spiegel has been plunged into chaos after revealing that one of its top reporters had falsified stories over several years.
The media world was stunned by the revelations that the award-winning journalist Claas Relotius had, according to the weekly, “made up stories and invented protagonists” in at least 14 out of 60 articles that appeared in its print and online editions, warning that other outlets could also be affected.
Relotius resigned after admitting to the scam. He had written for the magazine for seven years and won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014.
Earlier this month, he won Germany’s Reporterpreis (Reporter of the Year) for his story about a young Syrian boy, which the jurors praised for its “lightness, poetry and relevance”. It has since emerged that all the sources for his reportage were at best hazy, and much of what he wrote was made up.
The Hamburg-based magazine, which was founded in 1947 and is renowned for its in-depth investigative pieces, said Relotius had committed journalistic fraud “on a grand scale”. It described the episode as “a low point in Spiegel’s 70-year history”. An in-house commission has been set up to examine all of Relotius’ work
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Well, in the old days it was a choice of the 9mm or the piano wire. Today’s Germany is a kinder, gentler nation. He will be forced to ghostwrite Burqel’s memoirs
We’ve entered Turkish levels of Deep State. No one group has enough power to keep the internal disagreement behind closed doors so they’re spilling out into the public realm.
It’s like back in the day when a mob war would erupt until one family had enough power to keep everything under control.
I’m trying to think when was the last time that the elected politicians had more control than Deep State. Maybe Reagan. Even then, a lot of Reagan’s top people were Deep State themselves.
I’d say that Deep State and a certain foreign intelligence agency really started getting the upper hand during the Clinton years. Bush II was a puppet as was Obama. Trump was a mistake that they quickly dispensed with. Now we have another puppet.
The problem is that the various factions of Deep State, Big Tech, big donors, the Tribe and the remaining Puritan elite are all vying for control of the areas that they care about. And they’re doing this against the backdrop of Wokism gaining more true believers who view them as thwarting their utopia.
As if that wasn’t enough, the brown horde continues its march into the country making the situation more volatile.
Interesting times.
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The Regime decision both to take out Harris and humiliate her really has my attention. Obviously, such a clueless and retarded bitch is a braindead puppet, but whoever operates her seems to be getting a good smackdown.
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She’s the Big Tech faction. But it’s hard to say if that faction is taking a beating or that Harris is just that bad.
Maybe Big Tech has abandoned her. Maybe a different faction is exerting its control over Big Tech.
Welcome to regime-ology. You’re only getting a look at the shadows.
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I’ll give Team Biden their due on choosing Harris as VP: “You mean we get a bunch of Silicon Valley cash *and* a complete dunce that we can run circles around, someone so awful that even our sworn enemies won’t want to replace us with her? Deal!”
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Yup! Nailer her, er, it!
The real question is why Big Tech took the deal. Maybe they’re showing their inexperience in retail politics.
They assumed that the actual politician didn’t matter. That the public would accept anyone.
They were wrong and it’s a good lesson for them.
I remember an interview with Stephen Glass’ co-worker in which the co-worker admitted that glass got away with so much, largely because all his fake stories played to liberal prejudices. It seems that as liberalism has in many ways exhausted itself, and yet also hardened itself and become more strident, the media is willing to go the next step and just sort of allow the Stephen Glass’ of the world free reign. It makes me think of holocaust survivors, who’s stories have been proven false, but no one really takes them to task over it. You know, cause morally they are true…
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The cucks are just as bad. What good conservative doesn’t want to believe Biden crapped himself with the pope?
It is very easy to convince someone of something they want to believe and very difficult to get someone to believe what they don’t want to believe.
Also, IIRC, Gass’s lies were about Greenspan, the fed chairman. I think it was about how the Wall Street types built a shrine to him or something. Not exactly liberal bias.
At my elementary school a local news reporter interviewed my cousin for your standard fluff piece about some local event. His response didn’t pack enough punch, so she fabricated a response out of thin air and attributed it to him.
Another example is Ben Smith interviewed me at a book signing for Sarah Palin’s book back when he was more of a small fry. He was clearly trying to trip me up with his questions. I must have passed, as none of my statements made his article. I’ll give him credit for not outright lying I guess.
We need to come to grips that the media has always been like this, and only a vague sense of professionalism kept them at bay. Now even that is gone.
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“only a vague sense of professionalism kept them at bay. Now even that is gone.”
Well said.
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“We need to come to grips that the media has always been like this, and only a vague sense of professionalism kept them at bay. Now even that is gone.”
As if people forgot the lessons of plays or movies like “The Front Page” or the depiction of the press in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”.
I blame “All the President’s Men” for this.
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Those movies were made by the same people controlling the newspapers.
The film were made explicitly to create a trust confirmation from an apparently unconnected source for something that was always a croc of shit and used to direct your behavior.
The shows are the planted stooge in the audience used by the fake psychic acts.
You just never realized it.
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This is true. There has been a collusion between Hollywood and the journalist. They promote each other and it’s been going on for generations. There used to be a time when we knew that reporters were scum and actors needed to be kept away from polite society. And it really wasn’t that long ago
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I had a family member attacked by the local media back in the 80s. They went so far as to lie about peoples’ names. It was the entire local media. I don’t know about back in the 50s or 40s, but all my life, the media has been completely untrustworthy.
Whatever standards might be left cannot overcome their desperation for money. The media is just way too big and there is not enough money available to support the bloated industry. So if a bit of lying or heavy editorializing is the difference between clicks and tumbleweeds, they’re going for the clicks.
“Using our regime-ology skills we quickly see that the drama of the story is mostly fake and intended to get attention.”
Ransom Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
There are a staggering level of layers in that movie. Truly one of the all-time greats.
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Do the cool kids even watch this stuff anymore. Plenty of nuggets to be gleaned, but being a product of the Boomers, prolly not.
Liberty Valance is one of my son’s favorite movies. He loves a lot of those older movies, but of course he’s an outlier.
Obviously, this is to mitigate and get ahead of something about to explode probably in regard to human trafficking, a sick perversion that apparently our Ruling Class both indulges and enjoys. Given the blackout of the Maxwell trial and sham prosecution of her, that is my guess as to the source of discomfort although it may be something else out of left field. The point of the story, to go to Z’s larger point, is not to inform or entertain.
At least Soviet propagandists had writing skills.
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Yeah and Chris Cuomos producer now being outed as a wanna be Jeffrey Epstein. I bet everyone knew about that they just don’t care but they’re going after Chris Cuomo so he got sacrificed. These people will get theirs eventually
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The Regime-adjacent and hangers-on delude themselves with self-importance and cease to realize how expendable they are.
The Cuomos are Exhibit A in what is lined up for White Democrats.
For people placed in the right spots there has to be ways to short-circuit the way this system works and the ideology that motivates it. False leaks that the leading dissident witch hunters are guilty of sexual harrassment, that AOC has attacked trans ‘women’ or something else. Turning the sickos on each other in their holiness spiral. Speed up the system crash.
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As Severian likes to say, it’s all Fake and Gay.
That is exactly the way I look at everything right now, and it makes me laugh. The only problem I have is that these fraudsters won’t ever pay the price for the destruction in social cohesion and trust that was built up by better men than they.
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The race bs has been a gift from the heavens for our so-called journalists. Now they can make up whatever they want when it comes to stories about white bogeymen hiding under the bed of young black men who are “just starting to turn their life around”.
It really is amazing what liars the media are and so consistently and for so long that it is even cured my Gell-Mann amnesia. I see a headline that says “100,000 children are going to starve in Afghanistan this winter” and I think, maybe, who knows?
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If the New York Times posted my birth certificate, I would immediately begin to question my identity. It is not just the “left-wing” media. I have the same response to all of it now.
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Watching sportsball used to be the normal venue for living vicariously and experiencing a visceral thrill of psuedo-manliness, augmented by also playing commander of an imaginary team in your head. That was then, this is now.
Media lying and malicious narrative manipulation is now so over-the-top that everyone loves playing conspiracy theorist for cheap thrills and mental exercise. And the best part is, most of the time, the conspiracy is real rather than fake! For example . . .
Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial for aiding & abetting the molestation of young girls while in cahoots with Jeffery (I did not kill myself) Epstein. The prosecution has limited its case to the “nuts & bolts” of grooming and the tangible horrors of the crime of pedophilia. And all of this is being orchestrated to shield and terminally bury the “real” story.
Jeff & Ghislaine were spooks who lured powerful politicians, businessmen, royalty, and other professionals into performing sex crimes while being videotaped covertly. Instant blackmail leverage which explains every insane vote of Congress going back at least 3 decades. Yes, this is really happening right here in River City. Stay asleep Normie and move along little doggy, nothing to see here.
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It is hard to take much from this essay aside from: there is a reason nobody studies the Western Roman Empire in Constantinople. Degenerates, eunuchs and praetorian slitting throats. For 1,000 years.
Around 600AD, the Roman’s were drinking out of the Tiber and shoving berries up their noses in the ruins of the Forum. Meanwhile, 1,000 miles to the east, the degenerates, eunuchs and praetorians staggered on and on.
God help me, my sons (and legions of unborn grandsons) with the skills and patience to provide our Imperial rulers the retirement that Rome gave Carthage.
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I am sure Chris Wallace will decifer the regime media for us over at CNN streaming. I don’t like Howard Stern but I liked his take on paying for CNN streaming just to watch Chris Wallace.
Isn’t one CNN enough?
The media has always been corrupt. Earlier, in the 20th century, they were able to maintain the charade that they were legitimate and told the truth. But, I noticed that it wasn’t just the media that was dissolving into a fictional narrative. Another thing that developed in the late 20th century was “Reality TV”. Its not just that its fake. Its not that the people that watch it don’t know its fake. The crux of the biscuit is that those that watch it CONTINUE TO WATCH IT! Just like they continue to pay attention to the mainstream narrative! What we are seeing is something that is basically professional wrestling. The outcome is know in advance, the wrestlers are just actors, albeit in relatively good physical shape, and the idiots that watch it love it! This is why I have little hope in Whites’ ability to solve the problems of their enslavement without violence and without everything being taken from them first. Too many of our people don’t care about the truth. They just want entertainment, no matter how fake it is.
The biggest issue I have with right now is that we are on the wrong side of history. No, I do not mean we are factually incorrect nor do I mean we are morally bankrupt. However, we are helpless as the powers that be write the present and the history with us as the bad guys. Media always writes the first version of history and most often it’s not edited.
What we are today what those who protested World War I & II, those opposed to a national bank, wanted coinage of free silver, etc were in their days. We’ll be the subject of a rebellious Chinese college student’s brilliant thesis about the destruction of the United States. That is, unless we actually start building a different narrative and a new future. Do what you can to bring new people to our side. Be an evangelist.
For ourselves… and our posterity.
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