Tag: media

Intellectual dishonesty caused the experts to misread the Gaza military situation

3:50 pm

Lies from CNN
Lies from CNN

Lies from MSNBC
Lies from MSNBC

Before Israel began its full scale ground assault on Gaza and the Hamas tunnels two weeks ago, the general consensus from practically every expert interviewed or writing about the attack assumed it would be long, hard, and difficult, taking many months before Israeli troops were able to take control of the Gaza strip and render Hamas impotent.

A good example of that analysis can be seen in this October 13, 2023 article. To quote:

When the huge force Israel has amassed is finally given the orders to enter Gaza and destroy Hamas, they will face a deeply dug-in, well-armed enemy with thousands of anti-tank weapons, drones, and small arms on the most complex battlefield there is. Hamas will be fighting from tunnels, sewers, and strong points set up in high-rise buildings and rubble. They will rake incoming troops with machine guns from alleyways and windows, as well as employ heavier weapons from rooftops and prepared cover, and then melt into the urban maze that makes up much of the Gaza Strip. There will be no element of surprise for this sojourn into deeply hostile territory.

Israeli troops “will face the greatest challenge of their lifetime,” John Spencer, chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point told The War Zone. “Attacking a defended city like this will be combat in hell. I do believe they can do it, but the cost will be high in urban warfare like this, since they will be attacking multiple cities.”

All the experts generally predicted the offensive would take months, and would involve huge casualties on the Israeli side.

I however predicted that the offensive, though not easy, would unfold far faster than these predictions.

This invasion will not be easy, but I also suspect it will not be as hard as many have suggested. Hamas’s power is mostly that of a bully, all threats and violence against the weak and helpless, with little real military capabilities. Israel now enraged is neither weak nor helpless. It will steadily but implacably work its way through Hamas’s tunnel system, but I think it will do so within a month.

Based on this report today, the experts now admit their pessimistic assessments were all wrong, and my analysis was right.
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19 comments

Surprise! The mainstream press still refuses to admit there was never any evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians

11:38 am

CNN's Jake Tapper, the face of the corrupt mainstream media
CNN’s Jake Tapper, the face of the corrupt mainstream
media

The release of the Durham final report [pdf] this week has produced a flurry of stories, reiterating the wholly unsurprising news that there was never any evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians and the entire story was a fraud, based on no evidence and drummed up by Democratic Party operatives working for Hillary Clinton both inside and outside of the FBI and Department of Justice.

The leftist mainstream press and the Democratic Party-controlled federal government of course reacted in mixed ways. First, Jake Tapper at CNN reluctantly admitted that the report is “devastating to the FBI, and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump.” In the same breath however he also tried to minimize the reports damning conclusions, which proved unequivocally that the reporting on this story from day one by him and everyone at CNN was either incompetent or outright lies.

The FBI meanwhile responded to the report with a short three sentence statement, admitting “missteps” were made but “dozens of corrective actions” have been taken since to make sure the agency “continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.”

Yeah, right. If you believe this hogwash from the FBI I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you, cheap.

Meanwhile other leftist mainstream news outlets scrambled to spin the report, to discredit it without even reading it.

Liars in 2017 and liars now, in 2023.

In truth, the facts brought out by the Durham report, detailed nicely in analyses here and here, simply restate what was patently obvious in 2017, for anyone with the willingness to look dispassionately at the plain facts. As I wrote in July 2017,
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48 comments

Marshmallow Farming

6:01 pm

An evening pause: At first glance you might think this an April Fool’s piece, but it really isn’t. To be a good April Fool’s joke, you have to be fooled for at least a little while, something this does not do. What this video does do however is illustrate in an hilarious way the empty fake nature of television news. This is what they do normally, which has as much reality as this video.

Hat tip Jeff Poplin.

8 comments

The utter childishness of modern intellectual discourse

10:01 am

The world is faced with threats of nuclear and chemical attacks from North Korea. Iran is hit by protests that might escalate into all out civil war. Islamic terrorist attacks have now become almost routine. And in the U.S. there appears to be corruption at the highest levels of the FBI and the Department of Justice, while at the same time the federal government has produced a national debt exceeding $20 trillion, with more debt on the way.

Have any of these significant stories been the primary focus of our American media, from either side of the political spectrum?

An objective look at the culture of today’s press says no. Even as the leftist American mainstream media continues to focus its energies on petty and ineffective attacks of Donald Trump, too many journalists on the right unfortunately appear to be diving right in to join them with their own petty counter-attacks. The result is a press that spends the bulk of its time on irrelevant stories of partisan bickering that have little substance or importance.

In the last week of 2017 we had one particularly acute example of this. First a mainstream liberal news source pushed an absurdly trivial story in a shallow effort to discredit Donald Trump. This was then followed by a frenzied and as-shallow response from the conservative press. I want to showcase both, not merely to illustrate how weak the original story was (which is obvious on its face), but to also point out the childishness of the response.

I must add that everything written in every one of the news sources that I will cite below appears to be 100% accurate. My point here isn’t to highlight examples of error-filled news reporting — which these days mostly comes from left leaning sources overwhelmed by their blind hatred of Trump — but to illustrate reporting from both sides that hardly rises above the level of a five year old, and is thus completely inconsequential.

From CNN: Truck blocks cameras from filming Trump on golf course.

Apparently the day before CNN had managed, by peering through some bushes on the edge of the Trump International Golf Club in Florida, to videotape President Trump playing some golf. When they came back the next day a white truck now blocked their view. This then became a big scandal for CNN, with the cable network then spending gobs of time every hour for the next few days investigating the truck and following up on this terrible act of corruption, obviously part of the evil Trump administration’s effort to cancel the First Amendment and to silence the press! Much of the leftwing media piled on as well. Below are some of CNN’s coverage, as well as a bit of that liberal news pile on.
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25 comments

Pan Am Boeing 707 – 1965 Emergency Landing

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This television news report about a 1965 near disaster where a Pan American passenger jet’s engine and wing fall off and the captain brings everything down safely is fascinating to watch, partly because of the live action footage taken by one passenger, but also at how television news has evolved since then, for the worse. This 1965 report has no shots a newsperson standing in front of the camera telling us what happened, as is typical today. Instead, the filming focuses on the events and the witnesses themselves, and lets them tell the story in as straight-forward a manner as possible.

Hat tip Mike Nelson.

7 comments

A blogger with brains and a passion for free speech explains to the brainless and partisan mainstream press why the Obama administration thinks it can get away with monitoring the news gathering operations of the press and not face outraged criticism.

9:09 pm

A blogger with brains and a passion for free speech explains to the brainless and partisan mainstream press why the Obama administration thinks it can get away with monitoring the news gathering operations of the press and not face outraged criticism.

Read it all. If you happen to be a journalist with any ethics, it will make you sick.

6 comments