Censorship Coming

Selecting solely from mainstream media articles that show up on my News Feed on Facebook, I see the following headlines...

Following Trump Win, Georgia Plans to Ban Hijabs -- When I look at the article, I find that such a bill was proposed by one legislator, not actually even entered or seconded. Saying that Georgia plans to ban hijabs is false, even according to the text of the article. Adding the bit about, "Following Trump Win" is clearly intended to feed into the liberal narrative that Trump is going to persecute Muslims. Every bit of news that takes place after the election results were in are following a Trump win. When something good occurs, do they say, "Following Trump Win,..."?

Transgender Mainers Face Uncertain Future -- This from the Bangor Daily News, is intended to make people think that Trump just might have them all killed. In reality, the article is just a recitation of people who believe the same nonsense that this article was intended to produce. Don't we all face an uncertain future?

Immigrants in Lewiston Claim Harassment After Trump Elected President -- From a Maine television station, this is also intended to feed into a false narrative, since there were always immigrants in Lewiston claiming harassment. Several years ago, someone reportedly threw a pig's head into a mosque, and I don't remember the news headlines making reference to the Obama presidency.

Trump Considering Former Libertarian Party Candidate for Secretary of State -- Perhaps he is, but Trump has tweeted at least twice now that no one knows who is going to be picked until he announces his choices. The article is based on what might be a fact, that this person visited Trump Towers, and it supposedly quotes one unnamed Trump staffer, while also saying that another unnamed Trump staffer denies it. There's no story here.

Japanese-American Internment is Precedent for National Muslim Registry, Trump Backer Says -- It turns out that the Trump backer is someone named Carl Higbie, who made the comment to Megyn Kelly, who hates Trump, shortly after the election. Karl Higbie is a former Navy SEAL and referred to as a spokesperson for a pro-Trump PAC. Well, the PACs don't speak for Trump and, by law, Trump isn't even supposed to have a conversation with them. I'm a Trump backer, but my views are not Trump's views.

Mike Pence's Hateful Laws Almost Kept Me From My Dying Wife --- The entire basis for the article is that Pence opposed Indiana's gay marriage legislation. Incidentally, Pence was the governor, not a lawmaker, and he signed Indiana's gay marriage law when it was passed by the state congress.

David Duke Cheers Trump's National Security Adviser Pick -- For someone who hasn't been in the Klan for forty years and barely mustered 3% of the vote in his own Louisiana district when he ran for congress this year, David Duke's importance sure has been elevated by the mainstream media. Given that Trump had unkind things to say about Duke as far back as 1999, which is probably when he first heard of him, I have no doubt that David Duke is not a fan of Donald Trump. Duke may be a racist but he is not so stupid as to think that his accolades for Donald Trump are helping him. No, they just get his own name in the paper.

Trump's Transition Takes Surprise Twist -- Everything is a surprise twist to the media because Trump isn't talking to them. Instead, they watch people get on the elevator, and then guess at what position Trump might be considering them for. They announce that, and when it turns out that they were wrong, they report that as his transition team being in disarray.

 

These are the ones that come up when I hit "Home."

 

Project Veritas is also listed as fake news even though everything they have produced has been video recordings garnered during undercover operations lasting as long as two years and, unlike any mainstream media source, they have made the entire unedited video available for anyone who wants to view it. Project Veritas is the kind of investigative journalism that the mainstream media used to do, but they list it with The Onion as fake news.

 

The Wikipedia article uses some weasel words, and cites the settlement of a lawsuit to insinuate that the product (the video) was inaccurate, but that was not the reason for the settlement. The lawsuit did not claim that the video was inaccurate, only that O'Keefe had breached the plaintiff's privacy by recording him without consent. In that particular case, the video resulted in the closure of ACORN. Even the Huffington Post story on the suit, although written in such a way as to put O'Keefe in a bad light, does not state that the video was false. Instead, along with much of the media, it uses weasel words to insinuate that by referring to the video as "heavily edited," or "selectively edited," because they know that people will get the idea, from that, that it was falsified, which wasn't the case.

Every news show you watch on television has been both heavily and selectively edited. Project Veritas had more than two hundred hours of tape, far more than anyone would be willing to watch so, like any other production media, they selectively edited it to show the salient points. Yes, their intent was to make ACORN look bad, but if ACORN had not done anything to be bad, they would not have been able to produce the video they did. Not very many people would be willing to sit down and watch more than two hundred hours of unedited video. But, unlike the mainstream media, Project Veritas made the unedited video available to anyone who wanted to verify the content. You won't find that Project Veritas has produced false stories. The fact that organizations are closed and people are fired on the basis of their stories should attest to that.

The laws requiring consent for recording a conversation differ from state to state, and the Project Veritas investigation took them to ACORN offices all over the country, so they may have been unaware of the laws in that particular state. In Maine, oddly enough, only one party to a conversation needs to be aware that it is being recorded, so if I want to record someone else without his knowledge, I can do that since I know that it's being recorded, but I couldn't secretly record two people having a conversation who were both unaware of it. More likely though, the $10,000 settlement was considered a cost of production, since they obviously couldn't get the information they were looking for if they identified themselves and asked for permission to record.

Television stations and newspapers are regularly sued over stories that they produce. Sometimes they fight it, sometimes they pay it off.

The famous 60 Minutes expose on Big Tobacco in 2011 resulted in several successful lawsuits against the tobacco industry, yet its undercover video was edited to fit into a two-part 60 Minutes format. Yet, because 60 Minutes was a CBS production, no one made an issue over it being "selectively edited" or "heavily edited" and, although CBS did not make its unedited video available for anyone to review, I think its fair to say that they used only the parts that made the tobacco industry look bad.

I don't know that Trump had any friends among the mainstream media but in 2012, watching a Fox News report on one of Romney's speeches, I would get a different idea of how well he did or what he said than if I were to view the CNN report on the same speech, yet neither of these were false reports, and both were heavily edited.

No, Project Veritas edits its video in the same way that television stations do. They set out to do an expose on ACORN in the same way that 60 Minutes set out to do an expose on the tobacco industry.

 

I expect nothing else.

 

Occasionally, even left-wing rags like The Hill can be coerced into publishing something that makes sense. This is one of those occasions.

 

Adding a bit of conspiracy to this subject, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, is in Peru with President Obama.