When you've lost the Post

 

We're in upside down world for certain.  The Post and the New York Times have traded places.

Another magazine cover for Trump golf club walls

The story inside on page 26:

The New York Post has turned on him.  Will wonders never cease?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He has lost the NY POST!

Murdoch's Empire of Lies includes the New York Post

The New York Post published a story on 23 April headlined “Kam on in”, which claimed that migrant children were being given a copy of the vice-president’s 2019 book, Superheroes Are Everywhere, as part of a welcome kit in Los Angeles.

Laura Italiano was credited with writing the story but on Tuesday she announced on Twitter that being told to write the “incorrect story” was her “breaking point” over working at the tabloid.

“Today I handed in my resignation to my editors at the New York Post,” she said. “The Kamala Harris story — an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against — was my breaking point.

  

It was very foolish of her to quit AFTER writing the story. That will be on her resumé for the rest of her life.

The story was followed up by several rightwing outlets such as Fox News.

Of course. Another Murdoch property. 

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  

Don't know who's running this account, but the lie has been up for 4 days and counting.

He's even lost the New York Post

Such a loser. 

He can't.

The New York Post would like you not to remember it's Hunter Biden laptop debacle

A panicked Donald Trump Jr. on Thursday fired off a tweet calling for his dad to wage “total war over the election” — while parroting the same baseless allegations of voter fraud that his father has used to explain away his dwindling hopes of staying in the White House.

Twitter quickly hid the message from view for spreading false information about the election.

Trump Jr., who has a long history of using Twitter to fuel conspiracy theories, hit the send button amid a flurry of desperation lawsuits filed by his father’s campaign to turn the election — including one in Pennsylvania that sought to stop vote counting.

“The best thing for America’s future is for @realDonaldTrump to go to total war over this election to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters, that has been going on for far too long,” Trump Jr. wrote, repeating several conspiracy theories about the election and seemingly calling for Americans to go to war with one another. “It’s time to clean up this mess & stop looking like a banana republic!” he added.

  NY Post

That's exactly what we just voted to do, Junior.

About that Post story

The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

  NYT

So.....why did he write it?

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents. [...] Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing.

[...]

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Those two paragons of virtue? Why would anyone be suspicious?

Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

JFC! Right out loud, Rudy!

As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused.

[...]

Headlined “BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS,” the article appeared Wednesday with two bylines: Emma-Jo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch-owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.

Neither of whom wrote it.

Ms. Morris did not have a bylined article in The Post before Wednesday, a search of its website showed. She arrived at the tabloid in April after working as an associate producer on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. [...] Her Instagram account, which was set to private on Wednesday, included photos of her posing with the former Trump administration members Mr. Bannon and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as well as Roger J. Stone Jr., a friend and former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump.

Eager to debase herself wherever she goes, apparently.

Ms. Fonrouge [...] learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published.

Say again?

Last month, two Republican-led Senate committees investigating the matter said they had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the former vice president.

“The senior editors at The Post made the decision to publish the Biden files after several days’ hard work established its merit,” Mr. Allan said in an email.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have reported that they could not independently verify the data in the Post article, which included hedging language, referring at one point to an email “allegedly sent” to Hunter Biden.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is the Fox Turning?

Rupert Murdoch speaks regularly by phone with President Trump. But Murdoch also makes his views known to Trump through his newspapers and television networks. Lately the messages in those outlets have not been altogether positive for the president.

The conservative media mogul's papers have run a series of critical editorials and stories, spurring speculation among observers that Murdoch is trying to get through to the president.

  CNN

What's Rupert's beef with Trump? Not building that wall fast enough? Not bombing enough shit out of ISIS?

Murdoch's most prestigious outlet, the Wall Street Journal, ran an eye-popping editorial in its conservative-leaning opinion pages on Tuesday.

Titled "The Trumps and the Truth," the editorial scolded the president's family for withholding information about Russia-related meetings and discussions.

[...]

It was the latest in a series of eyebrow-raising editorials. Last week Murdoch's New York tabloid, the New York Post, labeled Donald Trump Jr. an "idiot" and "criminally stupid."

Ouch!

President Trump grew up reading the Post and still has it delivered at the White House, so the editorial may have caught his eye.

I would have expected a tweet calling the Post "Fake News" if it had. The staff probably told him the dog ate it.

It came on the heels of another blunt assessment by the Post's editorial board last month.

A three-word editorial about Trump's Twitter habits at the end of June said, simply, "Stop. Just stop."

Ate that edition, too.

Murdoch's Fox News Channel is a reliable source of pro-Trump boosterism from morning until night. But some critical voices have gained attention on Fox, too, including Charles Krauthammer, who recently said "bungled collusion is still collusion."

Krauthammer, too? Damn.

I can't get to the Wall Street Journal article without a subscription, but this isn't the first time the editors have criticized Trump.  Here's the NYT on a WSJ op-ed dated March 21, titled "A President's Credibility."

The editorial was an extraordinarily harsh rebuke of President Trump, calling him “his own worst political enemy” and asserting that he was damaging his presidency “with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.”

[...]

“Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39 percent. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth, most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.”

[...]

In particular, the editorial board pointed to Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones. “The President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle,” the editorial said.

  NYT

Double damn!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Post Retraction

Shouldn't that say "Correction" instead of "Editor's Note"?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This Isn't Going to Go Away

The Democratic Party is in double-down mode, and all its supporters are going along.

The Washington Post on Friday reported an genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat.

[...]

The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyber-attack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta – what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election.”

  Glenn Greenwald

Which hasn't even been proven, and seems at this point unlikely.

This is an extremely serious allegation and threat. If true, we're in serious shit. And, if not true, we're still in serious shit, because it means our government is now willing to fuck with our own democracy in the way it fucks with the rest of the world. A real threat of this magnitude could allow our government to claim a state of emergency and lock us down even tighter. In fact, why not refuse to allow Trump (or whoever comes after Trump) to take office when the country is under such a threat? I'm afraid I don't have any confidence that the Democratic Party of today wouldn't stoop to such levels. With their total screw up running Hillary for president and losing, they have become completely unhinged.

[Vermont]’s Democratic Governor, Peter Shumlin, said:

Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety. This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy issued a statement warning: “This is beyond hackers having electronic joy rides – this is now about trying to access utilities to potentially manipulate the grid and shut it down in the middle of winter. That is a direct threat to Vermont and we do not take it lightly.”

Nor should you take it lightly. But you damned sure ought to have incontrovertible proof of what you're saying. And you don't.

The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin’s menacing evil.

What’s the problem here? It did not happen.

There was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid.” The truth was undramatic and banal. Burlington Electric, after receiving a Homeland Security notice sent to all U.S. utility companies about the malware code found in the DNC system, searched all their computers and found the code in a single laptop that was not connected to the electric grid.

Apparently, the Post did not even bother to contact the company before running its wildly sensationalistic claims, so they had to issue their own statement to the Burlington Free Press which debunked the Post’s central claim (emphasis in original): “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop NOT connected to our organization’s grid systems.”

[...]

[T]here is zero evidence that Russian hackers were responsible even for the implanting of this malware on this single laptop. [...] [A]s Jeffrey Carr has pointed out in the DNC hacking context, assuming that Russian-made malware must have been used by Russians is as irrational as finding a Russian-made Kalishnikov AKM rifle at a crime scene and assuming the killer must be Russian.

A lot of us would absolutely do that, too, though.

All the alarmist tough-guy statements issued by political officials who believed the Post’s claim were based on fiction.

Meaning we could be in deeper shit than we realize. And that's saying a lot.

The Post had to walk back it's first claims when called out on them, but the damage, dare I say, is done.

Moreover, nobody knows when this malware was put on this laptop, how, or by whom. But whatever else is true, the key claim – “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid” – has now been replaced by the claim that this all shows “risk to U.S. electrical grid.”

Then fix the bloody system. That risk didn't just arise yesterday.  Electronic security has been a big issue ever since the Snowden affair and we still have powerful people, agencies and systems in the dark ages when it comes to internet security.

[This] level of group-think, fear-mongering, coercive peer-pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003.

[...]

Indeed, the more unhinged it is, the greater the benefits [for social media] are (see some of the most extreme examples here). That’s how otherwise rational people keep getting tricked into posting and re-tweeting and sharing extremely dubious stories that turn out to be false.

[...]

[A]ny denunciation or accusation toward Trump or Russia, no matter how divorced from reason or devoid of facts, generates instant praise, while any questioning of it prompts instant peer-group denunciation, or worse.

Perfectly mirroring what happened when the Bush administration painted Saddam Hussein as the mastermind behind 9/11. And look where that got us. Look where that has gotten the entire world. And that wasn't even a fight picked with a nation powerful enough to actually rain down a nuclear holocaust.

In this case, the effect is a constant ratcheting up of tensions between two nuclear-armed powers whose nuclear systems are still on hair-trigger alert and capable of catastrophic responses based on misunderstanding and misperception. Democrats and their media allies are rightly alarmed about the potential dangers of Trump’s bellicose posture toward China, but remarkably and recklessly indifferent to the dangers of what they themselves are doing here.

[...]

Since it is so often distorted, permit me to once again to underscore my own view on the broader Russia issue: of course it is possible that Russia is responsible for these hacks, as this is perfectly consistent with (and far more mild than) what both Russia and the U.S. have done repeatedly for decades.

But given the stakes involved, along with the incentives for error and/or deceit, no rational person should be willing to embrace these accusations as Truth unless and until convincing evidence has been publicly presented for review, which most certainly has not yet happened.

If you're still buying the propaganda, please read scroll down in Greenwald's article to the end where he links several articles that counter all this dangerous red-baiting.  Or if you're keeping up with the insanity, you might bookmark and save the page for when you need to calm down your friends and neighbors.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Trump and the Press

He's still whining about the New York Times.

Trump on Monday met with top executives and news anchors and hosts from major television networks.

In its coverage of that meeting, the Times said Trump “let them have it.”

He had planned to next meet with editors and reporters at the Times, which he frequently criticized during the campaign and after winning the election.

The newspaper announced earlier this month that it added 41,000 new subscriptions in the week after the election.

  The Hill

Such a nasty newspaper.

And not just the New York Times.

A glittering array of media stars and network executives made pilgrimage on Monday to the 25th floor of Trump Tower to meet with the president-elect. They all agreed that the discussions would be “off-the-record”: meaning they would conceal from their viewers what they discussed. Shortly after the meeting ended, several of the stars violated the agreement they made, running to The New York Post and David Remnick of the New Yorker to whine about Trump’s mean behavior. “The participants all shook Trump’s hand at the start of the session and congratulated him,” Remnick reported, “but things went south from there.”

[...]

To begin with, why would journalistic organizations agree to keep their meeting with Donald Trump off-the-record? If you’re a journalist, what is the point of speaking with a powerful politician if you agree in advance that it’s all going to be kept secret?

  Glenn Greenwald

Ummmm...to get privileged access?

Whether or not it actually is collusion, whether or not it actually is subservient ring-kissing in exchange for access, it certainly appears to be that.

[...]

[N]obody really believes that a discussion that takes place in a room filled with a couple dozen TV stars and their media bosses is going to be kept private, so the “off-the-record” agreement does not actually foster candor. It’s instead designed to achieve nothing other than creating a cozy atmosphere where [...] media stars get to feel like they’re colleagues and friends with the President rather than his adversaries.

[...]

[A]s was completely predictable, some of the TV stars immediately breached the off-the-record commitment they made – not by bravely reporting what occurred but by slinking around in the dark to anonymously whisper and gossip about what Trump said to them.

[...]

At least two of them ran to David Remnick to whine about how mean and critical Trump was. Remnick himself was outraged on their behalf, and conveyed this pitifully amusing anecdote:

[...] The television people thought that they were being summoned to ask questions; Trump has not held a press conference since late July. Instead, they were subjected to a stream of insults and complaints—and not everyone absorbed it with pleasure.

“I have to tell you, I am emotionally fucking pissed,” another participant said. “How can this not influence coverage? [...] After the meeting today, though—and I am being human with you here—I think, Fuck him! I know I am being emotional about it. And I know I will get over it in a couple of days after Thanksgiving. But I really am offended. This was unprecedented. Outrageous!”

"And I know I will get over it in a couple of days after Thanksgiving." And dutifully drop knee to the Fuhrer.

“I know I will get over it in a couple of days after Thanksgiving.” We believe you.

[...]

Rather than doing their jobs and being adversarial to Trump, rather than responding to this sort of bullying with some dignity and return aggression, it is a very good bet that they will respond with greater submission (the way they all stayed passively in their assigned press pens during Trump rallies).

[...]

[I]f they really believed “that they were being summoned to ask questions,” a form of a press conference, then what remote justification is there for keeping it a secret?

[...]

Donald Trump hates the U.S. media, as does the overwhelming majority of Americans. Even though every pampered star in that room is paid many millions of dollar a year and is flattered on a daily basis by teams of underlings, they are not actually entitled to respect and admiration, especially not from the powerful politicians they cover. [...] Who cares if Trump is nice to Wolf Blitzer and Phil Griffin?

[...]

Remnick writes that “Trump whined” in the meeting and showed how “vain” he is. That may be true, but the same is true of his anonymous friends for whose petty grievances he is crusading. There is much oppression in the world and many serious concerns as Trump heads to the Oval Office; how Trump speaks to Chuck Todd and Jeff Zucker is not on that list.

He's going to have a lot of papers to sue.

UPDATE:

“We will cover him fairly and aggressively, and we will not let his criticism of us sway us or keep us from doing what we have to do,” says Dean Baquet of the New York Times. “In my mind our mission is clearer than it’s ever been: we have to cover the giant story of this extraordinary White House, which is going to change American politics and policy for years to come, as aggressively, truthfully and honestly as we can.”

  Guardian

And no Trump voter will be reading you.

UPDATE: NYPost article with quotes.