Tag: journalism

A journalist and filmmaking team fake a study and the press buys it

10:54 pm

The uncertainty of science journalism: How a science journalist and two documentary filmmakers fooled millions (and many science journalists) into thinking that eating chocolate will help you lose weight.

My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

He then describes step by step how they did it. They even got their “research” published in a journal that claimed it did peer review but did not change one word of their submitted manuscript and published it less than two weeks after submission and the receipt of their money (science journals traditionally require authors to pay them for the honor of publication). In the end,

We landed big fish before we even knew they were biting. Bild rushed their story out—”Those who eat chocolate stay slim!”—without contacting me at all. Soon we were in the Daily Star, the Irish Examiner, Cosmopolitan’s German website, the Times of India, both the German and Indian site of the Huffington Post, and even television news in Texas and an Australian morning talk show.

The American women’s magazine Shape also fell for the fraud.

To me, the main reason the fraud worked was because none of the journalists involved ever bothered to actually read the science paper. They saw the press release, thought the story was cool, and simply rewrote the release. This is what happens repeatedly in the science field, and is why so much crap about climate science gets published. Too many reporters accept verbatim the claims of the scientists, doing no research to check the facts on which those claims were based.

I should mention also that John Bohannon, the man who played the scientist in this prank, also ran a sting operation against peer review journals in October 2013, creating a bogus paper and getting 157 journals to accept it for publication.

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PBS news anchor admits she is a Democratic stooge

6:08 pm

Even as PBS provided no coverage of the George Stephanopolis scandal, PBS news anchor Judy Woodruff admitted on air last Friday that she had contributed $250 to the Clinton Foundation, supposedly to provide charitable aid to Haiti.

It is unconscionable for any legitimate journalist to give any money to any organization run by a politician. If she wanted to help Haiti, there were many better charities, especially since the Clinton Foundation only gives 6% of its donations to charity, keeping the rest for Bill and Hillary. She did it to let them know whose side she was on.

Meanwhile, PBS’s reasons for not covering Stephanopolis’s own payoffs to the Clintons are downright absurd:

I asked the NewsHour’s executive producer, Sara Just, for the reasoning behind not covering the Stephanopoulos story on the air. She said: “We had an online piece but for broadcast we didn’t think it met the bar as a story for our limited on-air news hole that day.”

In other words, we can’t cover this because it exposes a fellow journalist as a Democratic Party shill, and we can’t allow the public to know that. We have to help ABC and Stephanopolis make believe they are objective journalists so that they, like us, can help Democrats get elected.

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The media’s fraud and dishonest bias documented

12:43 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: A detailed list of documented cases since 1992 where mainstream media sources were caught deliberately falsifying facts in order to slander conservatives or to promote the leftwing agenda.

None of these 48 examples are opinion pieces. In every case, false information or opinions were reported as facts, only to be found to be fabricated or completely counter to the facts as later documented. And as the author notes, the number of these faked stories has increased in recent years, partly because of the existence of alternative news sources on the web which point them out, but mostly because the mainstream media has become more blatantly partisan and dishonest in recent years.

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Celebrating the death of the mainstream media

7:41 pm

The rage builds.

[M]embers of the mainstream media are presumptively hacks, and the pain and misery they endure as their organizations convulse and die should inspire laughter and joy. Sure, there are honest reporters out there, but that’s only a fluke of statistics. There have to be some, if only because of the random vagaries of chance. They can get real jobs with the new media. But in general, MSM members’ pain is our gain.

Remember, they hate us. Hate us. They don’t merely not care about us. They don’t simply misunderstand us. They hate what we think. They hate how we live. They hate what we believe. They hate us.

And it shouldn’t come as a shock if we hate them right back. We normals have already started an unofficial, uncoordinated boycott of the mainstream media.

Read it all, and remind yourself that ABC News considers it perfectly acceptable for their lead anchor to contribute big bucks to the Democratic Party. This is also the same network that is working hand-in-glove with the communist dictatorship in Cuba to spread their propaganda.

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Stephanopoulos admits he is a Democratic stooge

9:50 am

Why I consider television news a Democratic Party cesspool: George Stephanopoulos admits that he had donated $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation, even as he conducted interviews condemning critics of that foundation, without disclosing his donations.

Meanwhile, ABC News has absolved Stephanopoulos of any wrong-doing, which is not a surprise, since from the perspective of television news Stephanopoulos didn’t do anything wrong. He supported the Clintons and the Democratic Party, both by how he reported the news and conducted his interviews, and now with money itself. This is exactly what a television news anchor is supposed to do in today’s modern television propaganda machine: Help Democrats get elected.

If you get your news information from this news source, you either are incredibly naive, or are a Democratic stooge yourself.

Update: The amount of money Stephanopoulos donated to the Clintons is actually $75K, not $50K as first reported.

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A real report of Hillary’s first campaign stop

11:37 am

Forget the press. Forget the spin. Read this report by an ordinary college student of her attempt to participate, as an “Everyday Iowan”, in Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign event. With great pictures.

My point here is not to lambast Clinton (of which this event is the least of her problems). My point is to lambast the press. This campaign stop was not much different than the campaign stops and photo events of all politicians, staged and managed and completely divorced from reality. Sadly the press goes along and reports the staging. This report, created by an amateur, instead gives us the reality of the event, something that the press should be doing.

Instead, our mainstream press plays along with the politicians. They should be ashamed.

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The skewed view of American inside the progressive bubble

10:10 am

Link here. The author captures well the cultural and intellectual chasm that exists between the modern American elite community, mostly leftwing, and the rest of American society. Sadly, that chasm is very clearly demonstrated by how most reporters are covering the emerging Presidential campaign. Read it and note the differences in how they approach both sides: They greet the Republicans with skepticism and scorn. They have private off-the-record dinners with Hillary Clinton.

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It’s National Hate Week!

4:31 pm

Link here.

Today, we’re all hating on Indiana. Who will be the left’s Emmanuel Goldstein next week?

Evidently, the sole function of the media these days is to subject the public to a steady stream of manufactured events: “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”; nuclear power kills; Lena Dunham’s rape by a college conservative at Oberlin; the “mattress girl” raped at Columbia University; Jon Stewart is funny; a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia; and a law protecting religious freedom will lead to separate water fountains for gays in Indiana.

The whole country has to keep being dragged through these liberal hate campaigns, but as soon as the precipitating event turns out to be a gigantic hoax, the truth is revealed like a bedtime story being read to a child: The ending is whispered and the narrator tiptoes out of the room.

Read it all. It will help you distinguish between real news and modern leftwing propaganda, based on lies, being promoted by our modern mainstream press.

Meanwhile, that pizzeria whose owner said they wouldn’t cater a same-sex wedding, though they’d be glad to sell pizzas to homosexuals, has been forced to close because of death threats, including one threat on twitter from a high school coach who thought it a good idea to get together and burn the place down. She has since been suspended from her job.

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What every conservative politican should answer when asked a stupid gotcha question by a journalist

10:30 pm

“You want my opinion? My opinion is that you’re not very good at your job and your boss should send someone else to do this. If you want to know about what they said, go ask them. If you’d like to talk to me about the issues or anything I said, feel free. Next question.” [emphasis in originial]

Read it all. It makes perfect sense, to demand better from these reporters. And it works! I remember listening to Margaret Thatcher as she did this to an NPR reporter back around the time of the Falklands War. Very quickly the reporter got focused on asking intelligent questions, and the interview for Thatcher turned out to be resounding success.

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Brian Williams is no exception, he is the rule

10:42 am

Lying journalists like Brian Williams are the standard in today’s mainstream media.

Whether or not the entertaining Williams keeps his job, we have a media establishment overrun with serial distorters, gotcha artists, exaggerators and liars. And whether Williams stays or goes, people will continue to report low levels of trust in journalists. That’s because the problem is far bigger than the occasional Sabrina R. Erdely, Stephen Glass or Brian Williams.

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Ratings plunge for network news shows

3:40 pm

All three networks have lost significant viewers since it was revealed that NBC’s lead anchor, Brian Williams, routinely embellished or lied in describing past events in his life.

Not surprisingly NBC has lost the most. However, the reason all three networks have been hit can best be illustrated by this quote at the link by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough:

I’m just hopeful, because I can’t be objective here, I’m hopeful that when all of the madness that’s going on, investigations that need to be going on, when the fury dies down and when we get through the storm and the decision is made to judge what Brian Williams’ future should be, that that decision will be based on the entirety of his career and not on one or two or three mistakes.

Scarborough reveals that he is willing to excuse lying by a news anchor. To him, finding out that Williams was a liar is “madness.” He also reveals that, in his television new community, such behavior should be excused, and that it isn’t that unusual and should in fact be tolerated.

As I’ve said many times before, if you depend on the media for your news information you are not only uninformed, you are misinformed. The entire Brian Williams story only provides further evidence of this.

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Got $500? You too can get a scientific paper published!

11:33 am

A Harvard scientist used a random text generator to create a fake science paper entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and was able to get it accepted at 17 journals. [Note: the link includes an auto-download of the pdf of the scientist’s fake paper.]

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Essentially, these fake journals are scams to get $500 from scientists, generally from third world countries who can’t get their papers published in the bigger first world journals. (What does that tell us about those bigger first world journals?)

The best line of the article however was this: “Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources.” [emphasis mine] It seems to me that if you are a journalist writing about a particular field, you should be reasonably educated on that field and be able to spot a fake journal. I certainly can. That it is assumed that mainstream journalists who report on medicine cannot speaks volumes about the quality of the field.

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The left wing pundit press makes fools of themselves

9:53 am

Link here. Be sure to watch the video and then read the article. As the author notes quite correctly,

Every one of these “pundits” have spent the last six years extolling the virtues of President Obama’s brilliant foreign policy. Every single one of these panelists have written columns, given opinion, and appeared on TV shows telling the consuming sheeple how brilliant President Obama was. Now they sit around presenting themselves as some form of disconnected gallery observers talking about how the consequences of those same policies they exalted are abject failures.

Insufferable does not begin to explain the level of hypocrisy within the U.S. Obama Praetorian guard media.

I must also note that this video clip does a great job of revealing how the entire panel on Face the Nation are all supporters of Obama and the Democrats. Repeatedly, as they described the President’s string of failures in foreign policy, they were forced to note that it was Obama’s “critics” who were right about every issue, “critics” that happen also to not be present on this Face the Nation panel. So, who are these mysterious “critics” that none of these pundits can name? They are conservatives, including Republicans, journalists, and tea party leaders, none of whom Face the Nation thought worthy of including on its panel.

This shows us again how completely worthless it is to depend on television for intelligent and objective reporting and analysis of the news. Mainstream television is working for the Democratic Party. Know that when you watch it.

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New York Times explains why it won’t publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons

8:36 am

bombhead

Cowards: “[L]et’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet.”

Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?

Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.

Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.

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“Why the media’s fact problems are much bigger than Rolling Stone.”

1:09 pm

Link here.

For those who haven’t been following the story, Rolling Stone recently published an expose about a supposed gang-rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia that they and their reporter used to illustrate the terrible rape culture of today’s universities.

The article has turned out to be largely a fabrication and has instead illustrated the terrible state of modern journalism as well as the corrupt truth-challenged intellectual elite of our society. Mollie Hemingway’s devastating analysis at the link above summarizes this situation nicely, also illustrating why much of what comes out of modern intellectual discussions today is total hogwash.

She doesn’t mention it, but I could not help thinking about global warming as well as the recent Orion test flight (“the spacecraft that will take us to Mars!”). In both cases the press has been seriously challenged to show some justifiable skepticism of official press releases and has failed miserably.

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Emails reveal press willingness to be manipulated by the Obama administration

3:35 pm

Transparency! Freedom of Information emails obtained from the Obama administration in connection with the Justice Department’s effort to allow guns to leave the U.S. for Mexico illegally, dubbed Fast-and-Furious, show the administration’s aggressive effort to manipulate the press and squelch any reporters willing to report the scandal honestly.

Key quote: “Any way we can fix Fox?” The emails also show that White House officials trying to silence reporting by Sharyl Attkisson, then working for CBS.

I am less outraged by the jackbooted behavior of the Obama administraton here than the wimpy willingness of the so-called independent press to follow the administration’s orders. The very effort of White House officials to silence journalists was a story in itself, and any good press person should jump at the chance to reveal this behavior to everyone. Instead, top editors at the major networks apparently got down on their knees to lick the boots of these White House officials.

It amazes me that anyone believes anything aired by these mainstream media news organizations. They have become a joke.

More here, including this juicy quote: “There are very few things that are actually as dishonest, wicked and corrupt as conservatives think they are. But CBS News is one of them.”

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Focusing on strategy instead of substance

6:14 pm

This article, about the back room maneuvers by both political parties leading up to last week’s election, has been making the rounds on all the political websites. Called a “must-read, vivid piece”, it reveals all the strategies, mistakes, and childish in-fighting that took place during the campaign, the kind of stuff that makes many people consider politicians such a lower form of life.

I am normally not interested in these smoke-filled backroom stories as I care a lot more about what politicians do when they are in office. This is why I didn’t read the article until today, two days after it was published and after I had seen it quoted in maybe a dozen other political articles about the election.

Having read it I have to agree it is worthwhile reading, but my main take-away is that its focus on the campaign strategies and maneuvers by politicians of both parties epitomizes all that is wrong with modern political journalism as well as the interests too many of its readers. Only once did the article hint at the actual issues crucial to the election, when it summed up the Republican strategy near the beginning of the article:

From the outset of the campaign, Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.

That’s it. That’s the only hint at real substance in this whole very long and detailed article.

For you see, the election was about Obama and his fumbling incompetence. It was about the policies he and his Democratic supporters in Congress had foisted on the nation. And it was about how those policies have been a disaster for ordinary people all across the nation.

All the games that these politicians play against each other during campaigns really isn’t that important. It might tell you something about their character, but what really matters is what these guys do, when they are in office. Keep that in mind when the next election rolls around, because I guarantee that the politicians and the journalists who write about them are not going to be interested in talking about that. It would be far too embarrassing.

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Greenhouse gases up; Temperature stable

10:00 am

The uncertainty of science: Even as the Earth’s climate temperature has remained essentially unchanged for the past two decades, the rate of increase in greenhouse gases in 2013 hit its highest number in thirty years.

This Nature article is interesting in two ways. First, it actually breaks with the tradition of the past two decades and notes the gigantic uncertainties that exist in climate science.

The question remains, however, of why the rise in global mean temperatures near the surface has apparently slowed, after a series of exceptionally warm years in the 1990s.

To have mentioned an inconvenient fact like this, casting doubt on the theory of human-caused global warming, has been forbidden for decades in major journals like Nature. That the article does mention it shows that the inconvenient facts have become too obvious to ignore.

The second way the article is interesting is its repeated attempt to make believe that new theories, based on this very incomplete and contradictory data set, can explain the mystery.

Scientists have suggested a number of possible explanations for the global warming pause. According to the latest hypothesis, regularly occurring changes in circulation patterns in the Atlantic and Southern Ocean may have caused an increased volume of relatively warm water to sink to the depth of the ocean, thus reducing the amount of ocean heat escaping to the atmosphere.

The sad fact is that there are now dozens of theories to explain the long pause in global warming, none of which are convincing. The uncertainties continue to rule!

Similarly, the article also makes this naive statement:

Atmospheric methane, the second most important long-lived greenhouse gas, also reached a new high of about 1,824 parts per billion last year, mostly due to increased emissions from cattle breeding, rice farming, fossil fuel mining, landfills and biomass burning. [emphasis mine]

The certainty expressed here about the sources of methane increase in the atmosphere is misplaced. We don’t really know all the sources of the increase in methane in the atmosphere. Recent data instead suggests it could have many natural sources having nothing to do with human activities.

The bottom line remains: The knowledge we have of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate remains very incomplete and preliminary. Any theories about its nature and operation must be taken with a very large measure of skepticism. Any particular theory might be right, but it is just as likely that future research will very easily prove it wrong.

It would be nice if the journalists at Nature would take this advice.

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German journalists arrested by police in Ferguson

1:43 am

Modern American free speech: Two German journalists were arrested by police in Ferguson for wanting to take photographs of a burned out gas station.

The comments of one of the journalists was especially shameful:

This was a very new experience. I’ve been in several conflict zones: I was in the civil war regions in Georgia, the Gaza strip, illegally visited the Kaliningrad region when travel to the Soviet Union was still strictly prohibited for westerners, I’ve been in Iraq, Vietnam and in China, I’ve met Cuba dissidents. But to be arrested and yelled at and be rudely treated by police? For that I had to travel to Ferguson and St. Louis in the United States of America.

Except for the arrests of journalists there, I have not posted much about the situation in Ferguson, mostly because no one at present really knows what happened and the subsequent behavior of everyone has been exceedingly disgusting and uncivilized, undeserving to my mind of much attention.

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TSA don’t know nothing about geography

5:36 pm

Does this make you feel safer? A TSA agent did not recognize a District of Columbia drivers license and did not know it is part of the United States.

When Gray handed the man his driver’s license the agent demanded to see Gray’s passport. Grays told the agent he wasn’t carrying his passport and asked why he needed it. The agent said he didn’t recognize the license. Gray said he asked the agent if he knew what the District of Columbia is, and after a brief conversation Gray realized the man did not know.

What was unfortunate for this particular agent was that the individual he questioned also happened to be a television news reporter.

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TSA backs down

9:34 pm

The furor over TSA policy to allow illegal aliens to fly without identification has forced the agency to change its policy.

TSA employees at Laredo International Airport notified Border Patrol agents last night at 11 p.m. local time that a new policy was in place that would not allow illegal aliens to fly solely using an I-862, otherwise known as the Notice to Appear form. TSA employees stated they will allow illegal aliens who had been released on their own to travel with a foreign passport or ID in addition to an I-862.

The TSA continues to deny they ever had a policy in force that allowed illegals to fly without identification, but the fact that they have announced “a new policy” proves that denial is an outright lie. Moreover, so does the willingness of many Border Patrol agents to testify to the earlier policy, under oath, which also probably contributed to forcing the TSA to quickly change its policy.

From my perspective, this entire story proves once again how completely worthless the TSA is. We would be better off without it entirely. At least then we wouldn’t have to be subjected to sexual abuse whenever we boarded an airplane.

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Global warming scientists find another cute species to use for political purposes.

5:47 pm

The fantasy land of global warming science: Despite a stable and robust population for emperor penguins, combined with a new record in Antarctica this very week for the size of its icecap, scientists today issued a report demanding that this species be declared endangered because global warming will make them all die.

Global warming will cut Antarctica’s 600,000-strong emperor penguin population by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which the birds breed becomes less secure, a study said on Sunday. The report urged governments to list the birds as endangered, even though populations in 45 known colonies were likely to rise slightly by 2050 before declining. Such a listing could impose restrictions on tourism and fishing companies.

It’s insane. It is as if facts have no relevance. For example, the recommendation of the report is based entirely on computer models, the same models that have failed 100% to predict anything in the past twenty years. Moreover, the report admits the emperor penguin population is stable and large and is likely to increase in the next three decades.

But who cares! We have to save these cutsy penguins, so let’s make them endangered so they can be used as a political weapon against any disagreement about global warming!

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Update on the LDSD partly successful test flight

11:52 am

Another eleven news stories were published today on the LDSD test flight (go here to find them all), but only two gave an honest and informative appraisal of the parachute failure and the program’s future. This CBS report clarified the results well with these two quotes:

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator then fell toward impact in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii. The carrier balloon apparently came apart after the LDSD’s release and it was not immediately clear what recovery crews standing by in the landing zone might be able to retrieve.

and this:

Two more LDSD vehicles are being built for “flights of record” next summer.

Another report from Space Insider also provided this key information, something I would have expected every journalist in the world to have considered essential to their report.

Sadly, not one of the other news stories saw fit to mention that the test vehicle might have been destroyed because of the failure of the chute, nor did any of them bother to report that two more such test vehicles are under construction, allowing program to continue anyway.

That so many news stories were published on this test flight indicates the interest that exists in it. Too bad most reporters writing these stories were only interested in providing us propaganda and pro-NASA cheer-leading.

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Left wing activists demand but fail to prevent someone from videotaping an open public event they had scheduled at a college.

9:55 am

Fascists: Left wing activists demand but fail to prevent someone from videotaping an open public event they had scheduled at a college.

Watch the video below the fold. You will be amused when the leftists try to block the videographer’s camera and somehow think this prevents him from recording their actions. If anything, it allows him to document forcefully their lack of respect for free speech.
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