(Update below)
My friend Andy McCarthy got me thinking over a line from his latest editorial [my emphasis]:
“Nothing like this has ever happened in modern American journalism.
There’s been incessant bias, sure. Events and stories have been ignored, of course. There have been loads of smears. We were just subjected to four years of Russian “collusion” fabulism. But now, most of the institutional media is openly colluding — and pressuring Big Tech — to suppress a story that might damage their chosen presidential candidate. Journalists have become our censors. That’s definitely new.”
Never before have we seen the media platform weaponized and used against the citizen it was designed to protect.
For years we’ve respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press. Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences.
The same press that has the resources to dox a woman simply for nodding behind Trump during a town hall can’t spare the bandwidth to ask Joe Biden whether or not he profited off of his son’s relationship with the communist Chinese government.
The press should be on the side of the citizen questioning Democrat candidates instead of working to elect these candidates.
As I was mulling all of this over, this story broke and is currently at the top of Twitter’s trending topics:
Rudy Giuliani faces questions after compromising scene in new Borat film
The reputation of Rudy Giuliani could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat.
In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.
Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.
After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”
Apparently she was mic’ing him, or un-mic’ing him in these stills, which are all we see:
I have no other context for the stills, no video, no excerpts. The only thing we have to go on are what legacy media says, which I’m sure is properly objective and informative:
She spends some time elaborately taking off their microphones; briefly, he lies down on the bed. His hand is in his pants. Watching it, your brain turns into an exclamation point. They are strategically interrupted before more transpires, but you cannot help wondering exactly what Giuliani may have done next.
Eh. I’ve done media for a decade and have been on sets of every major network. I’m sure someone could take a still from a CNN audio tech unzipping the top portion of one of my dresses to place a mic pack on my bra strap and zipping it back up before running the wire under and around my neckline and affixing the lapel mic off-center in the front — or a still of a tech running a wire between the lower buttons of my blouse, up through my collar, to affix the mic in the center so my blazer’s lapel doesn’t brush against the mic during the broadcast. I’m assuming that’s why Giuliani leans back to tuck his shirt; some techs won’t just stick a mic on the lapel, they’ll run it up the shirt to avoid hitting other fabric. Sometimes, for smaller outlets, the reporter will mic the subject themselves. Long story short, unless I see video or context otherwise, the only thing I can criticize Giuliani for right now is meeting with a Sacha Baron Cohen op.
Speaking of Borat, Cohen’s front once emailed me to try to bait me into meeting with them:
I’m a suspicious cynic and a 15 minute search confirmed my initial reaction. They sent this to at least one other person who did fall for it; I’m not sure what they sent to Giuliani to get him to agree to sit down with them.
Does it matter though? Or — for the sake of the argument — assuming the worst, is it only OK when it’s a Zoom call?
There is nothing to substantiate the claims that journalist overlords are running with but that hasn’t provoked Twitter to corporately censor this story the way they did the Hunter Biden laptop story that has actual receipts. Remember that Big Tech began the corporate censoring of conservatives at the demand of legacy media in the first place.
We are in an information war.
Politicians make money from the salaries we pay them (or from sweet communist Chinese connections, if you’re a Biden). Journalists profit from the ads sold on their stories. You read those stories and respond to the ads. Social media platforms profit from the ads they push to their captive audience, the product. You are the product. When will we recognize the true balance of power?
We have the control. We need to act like it.
From my program earlier today:
*Update: Ben Dreyfuss from MotherJones, the so not at all conservative website:
Here comes a fake text:
But that didn’t stop the media from sprinting with it:
Nick Roberts @nickroberts317
UPDATE: https://t.co/iymFki2u0b https://t.co/SgCF43wKKyABC:
Nick Roberts @nickroberts317
UPDATE: https://t.co/iymFki2u0b https://t.co/SgCF43wKKy
Zachary Petrizzo @ZTPetrizzo
These messages from Nick Roberts allegedly sent to Rudy Giuliani are FAKE. "It is just satire," the college student tells me. https://t.co/1LGPBdRypC
Twitter not at all applying the same standards.
Irony:
Zachary Petrizzo @ZTPetrizzo
These messages from Nick Roberts allegedly sent to Rudy Giuliani are FAKE. "It is just satire," the college student tells me. https://t.co/1LGPBdRypC
These same media wailed about “disinformation” and yet zealously engaged in it themselves.
6:40 p.m. central: Giuliani responds:
I watched a weaponized media since Watergate. Where you been? Yes it keeps getting worse. When you let a beast run wild feeding off of your hard earned work, you will only find yourself poorer and more tired... and you will get a bigger beast.
tl;dr: Dana is sad that journalists have standards.