#mainstream media
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.
- Mark Twain
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The media’s rotten reporting on Biden’s social and climate bill (and it’s not just Fox News)
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The ambitious social and climate legislation now working its way through Congress will be enacted in some form. But its agonizing journey to date reveals the rotten job done by the media that’s supposed to inform Americans about our democracy.
Last week, the New York Times described the delay in House Democrats’ approval of the infrastructure bill as caused by a “liberal revolt.” On Saturday it reported that Biden had “thrown in” with his party’s “left” rather than its “center,” thereby “leaving his agenda in doubt.”
This is pure rubbish. There was no “liberal revolt” and there’s no standoff in the party between a leftwing fringe and a larger center. The vast majority of Democratic lawmakers in both the House and Senate support Biden’s agenda. The only “doubt” comes from two Democratic senators, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.
Passage of the infrastructure bill was held up in the House last weekend because Sinema and Manchin wouldn’t negotiate the size of the social and climate bill that was supposed to be attached to it.
The media describes Sinema and Manchin as “moderates” but they’re to the right of the rest of the party. If they’re “moderates,” does that make most Democratic lawmakers “extremists?” And why does the media continue to characterize them as “pragmatic” when, as Joan Walsh of The Nation points out, “it’s actually the progressives who have compromised; they are the pragmatists.”
You can see the same bias in how Biden’s social and climate bill is being described. The media almost never mentions what’s in it – a slew of extraordinarily popular items including childcare, pre-K, community college, paid family leave, child tax credits, and measures to slow climate change. Instead, almost the sole media focus is on how much it would cost. “Biden’s 3.5 trillion package” is the standard description.
Even this is wrong because the $3.5 trillion is spread over 10 years, making it $350 billion per year – about half of what we spend each year on national defense.
To make matters worse, the media’s focus on the bill’s cost ignores the larger costs of not passing it.
Millions of people without childcare, for example, can’t join the labor force – costing the economy tens of billions each year. Young people who can’t afford community college end up costing the economy vast sums in terms of lost productivity and whatever public assistance they may need down the line. If we don’t slow climate change, we’ll be spending hundreds of billions more per year dealing with worsening wildfires, floods, and droughts. If we don’t begin to reverse widening inequality, half of America won’t be able to buy the goods and services the economy produces. Talk about costs.
These biases in the mainstream media aren’t the result of intentional decisions among publishers, editors and writers to favor the status quo over progressive change. They simply reflect the dominant views of the American establishment, as seen mainly through the lenses of New York and Washington. The establishment supports the status quo and puts a high burden of proof on those seeking fundamental change because it is the establishment.
Yet as a result, the mainstream media is doing a rotten job informing America about one of the most important pieces of legislation to come along in decades, at a time in our nation’s history when fundamental change is badly needed.
What do you think? Tell me in the comments at https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-medias-rotten-reporting-on-bidens.
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The death toll in the US due to Covid has been talked about an awful lot this year, with good reason. It’s not good. However, there are two factors that big bad independent media talk about that never makes into the mainstream media highlight reel:
1. Dr. Deborah Burke, the medical professional who directly advises Trump other than Fauci, has asserted that the death toll is inflated by ~25% due to government stipulations on what quantifies a death *from* Covid as opposed to a death *with covid*. Once the two were clearly delineated, the deaths in places like Michigan (remember when the media talked about that state? Here’s why they stopped, I think) decreased by about 25%.
2. The duration of the flu season is from fall (so roughly mid September) through winter (ending in March). This is important because the Covid death tally is showing the current total deaths from Covid over the past 8 months, whereas the flu death counter resets once the season ends. It’s a clever trick mainstrem media use to inflate death numbers to incite panic.
“But people are still contracting Covid even now, so of course keep track of the deaths?” Absolutely, and people are still contracting Flu as well. Just because it’s not that diseases “season” does not render people immune to that disease.
CNN refused to air video of President Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un live. These people are fucking DERANGED. If you think they are news, you have a single digit IQ.
NYT Presents Strong Case for a War-Crimes Prosecution Against Russia
NYT Presents Strong Case for a War-Crimes Prosecution Against Russia
Whereas numerous instances of U.S. war-crimes have been documented in some news-reports well enough to be successfully prosecuted in international war-crimes tribunals (but the U.N.-authorized agency the International Criminal Court cannot prosecute U.S. war-crimes but only war-crimes by third-world countries’ leaders), such well-evidenced instances by Russia are far rarer. However, on May 19th…
#BobbiesTake
Black Tears Dry on Their Own
Any act of terror is harrowing and uncalled for. Call me simple minded, but I will never understand why men (always the men, isn’t it?) cannot sit and talk through things. Negotiate, reason. Why must it get to war?
But I digress.
You know what happened in Paris recently. You saw how the world got on its knees and mourned the losses. As it should. No loss of life should be overlooked.
But what about the deaths of thousands around the world? Where is the outrage, the GASP! the facebook button, the empathy for these people?
Here’s a little something from Joey Ayoub’sarticle for Global Voices:
The Human Body is not one. It sure feels that it should be by now. Maybe that in itself is an illusion. But maybe it is an illusion worth preserving because without even that vague aspiration towards oneness on the part of some part of the body, I am not sure what sort of world we would be living in now.
Some bodies are global, but most bodies remain local, regional, “ethnic”.
That is, most bodies remain deliberately ignored.
Damn.
Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika
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How teachers in Texas have to discuss the massacre in Buffalo, NY
Laws restricting lessons on racism make it hard for teachers to discuss the massacre in Buffalo
On one hand, she explained that authorities are investigating the killings as a racially motivated hate crime carried out by an 18-year-old who reportedly wrote of his belief in a conspiracy theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color through immigration, interracial marriage and integration.
“But I’m also supposed to tell you that that’s just one perspective,” Close recalled telling her students. “Another perspective is that this young man was out defending the world — or his kind — from being taken over.”
Close waited for her comment to fully register with her students, then added: “If you guys want to know why I’m thinking about quitting at the end of the year, it’s because of these types of policies — the fact that I have to have this conversation with you.”
FAKE NEWS: $10 per gallon gas pumps!
I don’t know how people keep missing this, as screaming obvious as it is, but if you add another digit to the gas pumps then they don’t max out at $10. They max out at $100.
…$99.999 to be precise.
ALL GAS PUMPS CAN ALREADY CHARGE $10 PER GALLON!
…$9.999 to be precise.
All gas pumps, no exceptions, can already charge $10 a gallon. Many can already be set to $100 a gallon. Within 5 to 10 years they all wil.
Why would anyone think otherwise? HOWcan anyone think otherwise?
Man, Woman & Trans Of The Year
We here at schooltrashers.com decided to nominate people we think deserve the title “(insert gender here) of the year”. We decided to put them in three different categories to even out the playing field, plus I don’t know many famous “transmen”, so I just put “trans” to simplify things. With that being said, let’s go start with…
Man Of The Year - Russell Brand
Although he’s not a right-winger, he seems to be triggering Democrats, the mainstream media and BreadTubers. This is due to him pointing out the truth and saying things that goes against the narrative. The Left hates that, they absolutely hate the truth. For this reason alone, Russell Brand truly deserves the title Man Of The Year.
Woman Of The Year - JK Rowling
She is standing her ground, pissing off The Left by recognizing scientific and biological facts. She does that by acknowledging there is a difference between men & women. That’s not transphobic by any stretch of the imagination. But the radical left wants to lie and indoctrinate people by claiming that gender is a “social construct”. Ironically by saying this, they don’t realize that “Gender Identity” is the actual social construct.
Trans Of The Year - Blaire White
She is absolutely awesome. Her political views triggers The Left. She even triggers The Left with her anti-pedophilia videos. This woman is incredible and yes I call her a woman because that’s what she looks and sounds like, but make no mistake that she is trans. She is what trans people should aspire to be like because she’s mature, intelligent and kind. Blaire White is actually awesome and sweet, unlike ContraPoints, Rachel Levine or Jessica Yaniv.
With that being said, I think The Left has a lot of growing up to do because they’re surely not acting like it with how hateful and intolerant they are.
