Opinion
By Jeff Childers
05-09-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! And it’s 2024. Which means it’s time for another literally unbelievable roundup of new our grandparents would have rejected as outright fiction: parasitic New York Times fake news hit piece on Robert Kennedy screws itself to the journalistic wall; big developments in the Fani Willis Trump show trial as appellate court agrees to take up disqualification issue; Biden goes sideways on Israel; Politico verges close to correctly diagnosing failing media industry’s awful problems but swerves at the last minute to avoid the truth; Boeing story goes big as military-industrial plane manufacturer crashes and burns in the public eye.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 The worm turned on the New York Times this week, right in its ‘free news’ garden, where glittery bits of regime propaganda distract naive readers while the paper’s long blades slide betwixt their ribs. The story started yesterday with the latest vermiform example published under a most unlikely headline (and the most unflattering photograph they could find), a headline that could only have appeared in this bizarre, unchartable year: “R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.”
The Times’ slithery headline editors, obviously well into their third or fourth red bull and vodka, slipped in a truly astonishing sub-headline, celebrated as an impressive effort by top tabloids like the Weekly World News: “The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.”
My goodness. There’s so much that could be said, but let’s use this sordid story to learn more about how “real” Grey Lady journalists create fake news. We’ll apply the Coffee & Covid ‘fake news’ test to the paper’s top article. To detect fake news, we must first ask whether the article was not actually about any real news, or was it rather about some antique event that happened a long time ago?
And right away, our little bluebird of truth catches its first ‘fake news’ worm.
The Times’ parasite story eventually explained that in a 2010 deposition — fourteen years ago — Kennedy recounted a brief story about once having experienced brain fog, gotten an MRI, and been told he’d had a parasite “that ate part of my brain.” Kennedy said the unidentified parasite died, no treatment was required, and that was that.
To be clear: the New York Times is not accusing Kennedy of being sick right now, or having any present cognitive problems, which would be pretty rich if they did, considering the Times’ favored candidate thinks cannibals ate his uncle.
Our second ‘fake news’ test is whether the story was anonymously sourced. Anonymity strongly suggests fake news. Especially when the anonymous source doesn’t have any good reason for being anonymous. Applying the second yardstick, again we see the mouldering hand of fake news, if not outright deep state hijinx. Although the Times’ ostensible ‘source’ was Kennedy’s 2010 deposition transcript, that’s not the end of the inquiry.
How’d they miraculously discover the transcript? The single most important unanswered fact, AWOL from this bit of alleged “journalism” was: who gave the story to the Times? The story, written with as straight a face as the reporter could manage, desperately trying to resemble something like “news,” never disclosed who clued the paper onto the fifteen-year-old event.
Was it Team Biden? Is the Times deep-diving Kennedy? Did the Kennedy team itself leak the story for some reason? Was it the CIA? Was it Hillary? Answers to those questions would frame the story completely differently, depending where this obvious hit job originated.
Finally, we evaluate whether the story used deceptive weasel words to paint a false picture. Again, we find the answer is yes. Here’s just one example, where the reporter slyly implied questions about actual evidence of Kennedy’s good physical health:
He has gone to lengths to appear hale, skiing with a professional snowboarder and with an Olympic gold medalist who called him a “ripper” as they raced down the mountain. A camera crew was at his side while he lifted weights, shirtless, at an outdoor gym in Venice Beach.
Skiing? Weightlifting? He sounds pretty healthy. What’s the source for the Times’ assertion that Kennedy has “gone to great lengths” to deceive the public about his health, or to cover up something? Because that’s what the trash, cowardly reporter was clearly implying. Fake news reporter Susanne Craig is a yellow-bellied, lizard-lipped coward — and if she doesn’t like that, she knows where to find me.
But Susanne probably delighted in asking the Kennedy team for a brain worm comment, but the campaign handled it deftly:
Asked last week if any of Mr. Kennedy’s health issues could compromise his fitness for the presidency, Stefanie Spear, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy campaign, told The Times, “That is a hilarious suggestion, given the competition.”
Indeed. And Kennedy himself promptly wormed his way out of the potential scandal, yesterday disinfecting the unfair hit piece with humor, which after all is the best medicine for cerebral parasitism:
In one sentence, Kennedy disarmed his slimy attackers and skewered the New York Times right in its tiny worm brain. Conclusion: fake news backfire.
🔥 The scandalous Stormy Daniels show trial in New York was recessed yesterday, so there was no news, but there was a major development in the Fani case, which wormed its way up to the top of yesterday’s news. The Atlanta Journal Constitution ran the story headlined, “ANALYSIS: What could appeal of DQ fight mean for Fulton Trump case?”
The news — which was proper news, since something actually happened yesterday, not decades ago — was that Georgia’s appeals court accepted the Trump Defendants’ appeal of Judge MacAfee’s denial of their motion to disqualify DA Fani Willis and her office from the case.
The first casualty was the case. The Journal-Constitution, obviously depressed and on its way to pick up several fifths of Jack Daniels with which to drink itself into oblivion, was forced to admit that “with the question of Willis’ removal tied up in appeals court, any major action on the underlying Trump election case will be postponed until well into 2025.”
Womp womp. Someone should order the AJC a wellness check.
The pained and exasperated AJC explained to its readers that Georgia’s courts of appeal are notoriously slow, and the soonest the appeal can be reasonably expected to be resolved is early next year. After the election. Which, by the way, is not that slow for an appeal, but I digress. Next, the AJC tearfully observed, whoever loses will then appeal to Georgia’s Supreme Court. So who knows how long it could take?
The Fani Willis case is now, for all practical political purposes, D.O.A.
But while there’s no more electoral upside for Fani, there’s still plenty of downside. District Attorney Fani “front me a G” Willis is now embarking on a new romantic adventure, this time in a Masterclass exploring the age-old aphorism, act in haste, repent in leisure. The AJC listed the Masterclass topics under a sub-headline starkly warning, “Possible nightmare scenarios for Willis”:
It’s possible the court overturns McAfee’s ruling and issues what would be a nightmare decision for Willis and her office: mandating that she be removed from the biggest case of her career and that her staff, with expertise generated over more than three years of work, also be disqualified. Trump and his co-defendants also want the charges against them dropped, which if granted would be a catastrophic result for prosecutors.
Not only that, but the frisky DA is currently running for re-election, and faces a primary challenger on May 21st — coincidentally the same day the clock runs out on comedic President Zelensky’s term — and if she survives that, she’ll face a Republican opponent in the general election. Meanwhile Judge MacAfee is continuing to hear the many other procedural challenges to the derailed train wreck of a case, keeping the whole sordid story squarely in the nation’s klieg lights.
🚀 USA Today ran the latest political bad news for Team Biden in a story headlined, “Biden pauses bombs shipment to Israel over humanitarian concerns in Gaza.” Joe’s speechwriters aren’t doing much better than bibblebly-speaking Kamala Harris could do herself. Yesterday, during his Holocaust remembrance speech, the aging cannibal-hunter gravely intoned “the truth is” — he paused for dramatic effect — “we are at risk of people not knowing the truth.”
Um, okay Joe. The actual news was that during a Senate hearing yesterday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed withholding a single shipment of military aid to Israel. “As we have assessed the situation, we have paused one shipment of high payload munitions,” he explained. In other words, they kept the bombs this time.
But the day before, on Tuesday, Biden said that American support for Israel was ironclad. So “ironclad” means, unless I change my mind. The net result of the two announcements was a totally incomprehensible, schizophrenic foreign policy. The decision to withhold the bomb shipment was, as usual, made in secret, without consulting Congress, and upset both Democrats and Republicans.
Congress just passed a military support package for Israel as part of its tragic ‘deal’ with Biden for more useless Ukraine aid. So Israel isn’t even getting the aid.
The article pointed out that Israel has just started a new offensive in southern Gaza, and the State Department is now overdue on producing a report to Congress on whether Israel is complying with humanitarian concerns in the embattled region. Unstated in the article were any of Biden’s political problems arising from his support for Israel’s war on Hamas, which annoys a significant part of his party’s base.
Update: at the time of press this morning, CNN ran a doubling-down story headlined, “Biden says he will stop sending bombs and artillery shells to Israel if it launches major invasion of Rafah.” So, not just “one shipment” after all. Sorry Congress! Sorry Speaker Johnson. Joe had his fingers crossed when he made that deal.
🔥 Politico ran a deeply introspective, long-form, magazine-style story yesterday headlined, “The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It.” It got so close to the truth. But fortunately it avoided an unhappy accident with accuracy and vomited up a gigantic, self-pitying missive instead.
The Good Old Days of Non-Diverse, Swaggering Journalism
Weirdly framing the news industry’s controlled demolition as a loss of “swagger,” whatever that is, the article correctly observed the exodus of good reporters from corporate media to Substack. But instead of correctly identifying the real reason for the various departures — mostly they were facing cancellation for refusing to constantly agree with false government narratives — Politico instead diagnosed the problem as veteran reporters, used to wielding their toxic masculinity whenever they wanted, now being unable to “swagger” around soy-drenched, emasculated corporate newsrooms.
I am not making that up.
Here’s the closest the article got to explaining what in the devil it was talking about:
The psychological approach journalists bring to their jobs has shifted. At one time, big city newspaper editors typified by the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee strode their properties like colossuses, barking orders and winning deference from all corners. Today’s newspaper editor comes clothed in the drab and accommodating aura of a bureaucrat, often indistinguishable from the publishers for whom they work. These top editors, who once ruled their staffs with tyrannical confidence, now flinch and cringe at the prospect of newsroom uprisings like the ones we’ve seen at NBC News, the New York Times, CNN and elsewhere. You could call these uprisings markers of swagger, but you’d be wrong. True swagger is found in works of journalism, not protests over hirings or the publication of a controversial piece.
The only direct, non-psychological problem cited in the article was an alleged increasing fear of civil lawsuits filed by the targets of media’s hard-hitting investigative journalism. But — fake news alert — the story only cited a single problematic case: Hulk Hogan’s successful defamation case against tabloid Gawker for running a private sex tape. How Hogan’s case suppressed the rest of corporate media remains anybody’s guess; the article didn’t clearly say. Nor did it quote any of the veteran reporters, now self-employed, as themselves claiming fear of lawsuits was the reason they fled their newsrooms for more lucrative Substack gigs.
The article often exhibited tiny flashes of inspiration. In one brief nod to what is really going on, Politico quietly observed that “the public appears to hate them too, according to polls that claim they’re not trustworthy.” But, how did that loss of trust happen? Politico doesn’t say, except to wail about the trend, and to blame that all-powerful bogeyman, Trump:
Thanks, in part, to a fall in status, as well as ever-irrational attacks from politicians like Donald Trump, today’s journalists routinely experience ridicule and harassment at public events like rallies and demonstrations. They’re not precisely pariahs in the new environment, but they’re no longer considered heroes in many places. For journalists, the fall has been spectacular and seems never-ending.
Some people think corporate media journalists deserve to experience ridicule. Some people who are writing this commentary and ridiculing Politico right now, as one example.
Other times the political magazine showed an astonishing lack of self awareness. According to Politico, other unintentionally hilarious supposed causes of media decline included its fear of offending people:
“Millennials and Gen Z have been bred like human veal by their Boomer and Gen X parents who made sure their kids were constantly being surveilled and optimized for success in SATs, sports and entry into the Establishment pipeline,” Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie says. “Can we be surprised that such a system has produced generations of journalists who endlessly describe anything they disagree with as misinformation and want to control and regulate everything like the room temperature in an after-school enrichment program?”
This attitude has permeated the press, as editors recoil from publishing anything that might cause anyone offense.
Fear of causing anyone offense? How about, see, e.g., the Times’ Kennedy brain-worm headline, at the top of today’s post. Please.
Nor would Politico have had to expend any effort to check in on the democrat journalists who ran away from their corporate media gigs and are now working on Substack and X. For instance, award-winning journalist Michael Shellenberger is currently under investigation and facing potential criminal charges for posting true emails from Brazil’s Supreme Court that he got from a whistleblower. As recently as yesterday, Shellenberger posted this on Twitter/X:
Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) on X.
That’s one. Or Politico could have asked the subject of the very first example that started the whole trend, New York Times’ liberal, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and author Alex Berenson, who escaped to Substack after being blacklisted for questioning the covid narrative. Politico might also have asked Seymour Hersh for a comment. But no.
Of course, I’m not a media expert. I’m only a lawyer. Maybe there’s a good reason for why not ask the very people you are using as examples. After all, who cares what they think?
Maybe — and I’m just spitballing here — maybe these top journalists have not so much fled their corporate media jobs for “more lucrative” independent work. Maybe the truth is closer to their having been pushed out of their corporate media jobs for doing real journalism. Maybe the news industry is collapsing, taking its soul down with it, because of its slavish devotion to its deep state narrative masters.
Lie down with spooks, get up with soulless collapse.
Politico, you are so close. Keep working on it. You’ll get there.
✈️ Fox ran yet another Boeing-Boeing story yesterday, this time headlined, “FedEx Airlines, Boeing-made plane forced to land in Istanbul without front wheels.” Yep, it happened again. More than once.
Fedex Express Flight 6268 — a Boeing 767 — was flying from Paris to Istanbul yesterday morning when it suddenly radioed the Turkish traffic control tower, advising that its front landing gear had failed to open. Which is never a welcome development and always promises some kind of painful resolution. Alert airport rescue and fire teams prepared the runway and the tower told the plane’s crew to proceed with landing. Fortunately, no one was injured.
But the bad Boeing news kept mounting up. This morning, NDTV News ran a companion crashing story headlined, “Boeing Plane Skids Off Runway At Senegal Airport, Flights Suspended.”
All we know so far is that last night, all flights were suspended at Senegal’s main airport near its capital city Dakar, after a Boeing 737 “suffered a runway excursion” — in other words, skidded off the runway — and crashed.
Boeing boeing! That wasn’t all. The hits kept coming. Also yesterday, numerous outlets broke a Boeing story that had been bubbling on social media all week. The UK Independent ran its article under the headline, “Boeing is facing ten more ‘safe and sound’ whistleblowers after two die suddenly.”
I sure hope the ten new Boeing whistleblowers have their life insurance policies paid up. Haha, just kidding. Mostly.
John Barnett, 62, a quality control engineer at Boeing for 32 years, and a witness in ongoing litigation, was found dead at a hotel in March, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was found in his truck while staying at a hotel while in town to give a deposition in the case. It seemed like a strange time to kill himself.
Here’s a link to a recent clip where Mr. Barnett discussed some of the serious problems with a Spirit Airlines Boeing inspection. He told The Wall Street Journal in January that Boeing fired him in April 2023 for pointing out that holes in jet fuselages were drilled wrong. He was quite chatty about Boeing’s many safety problems, actually.
Then last week, the whistleblower bodycount ticked up again after Joshua Dean, 45, who worked as a quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems, died suddenly after a “short illness.” The healthy, athletic auditor and whistleblower had an ‘active lifestyle.’ But alas, he died in the hospital after getting a “fast-moving infection” arising from the flu, which quickly became MRSA, and then he got pneumonia on top of all that and it was all over.
The lawyers for the two dead whistleblowers told The Independent of at least ten more Boeing whistleblowers, both former and current employees who, the lawyers emphasized, are not suicidal and are “safe and sound.” Hopefully they’re in witness protection.
On Monday, the FAA announced a new Boeing investigation, after the DOD-connected manufacturer “voluntarily” admitted that inspections of a number of its 787 Dreamliner models “may not have been completed.” Passive voice alert! Mistakes were made. The FAA announced the agency is now investigating “whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records.”
People are, shall we say, ‘skeptical’ about the rash of sudden deaths connected to Boeing investigations. Back in March, after Barnett’s suicide, in a tweet about Barnett’s untimely and tragic death, brain worm survivor and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (2.9 million followers) decorated the word “suicide” with dubious scare quotes:
Hope for a genuine investigation? Kennedy might be the New York Times’ third most hated person after President Trump and Emmanuel Goldstein, but at least he’s an optimist.
Be optimistic like Kennedy! And have a terrific Thursday. The over-the-top 2024 news will continue tomorrow, just you wait, with a fabulous fresh C&C roundup.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
