The Continued Integrity Spiral Of The Media.

In this weeks installment of “is this satire, or reality”, media has officially lost the last bit of credibility it may have had left.

The media has officially:

LostMind

They went on quite the tear yesterday, practically bending over backwards to praise North Korea, specifically the first lady of tyranny Kim Yo-jong, with tweets like this:

CNNProNorthKoreaWhy exactly is this “problematic”?

Well for starters, North Korea is practically one giant human rights violation. The country currently has over 100,000 of its own citizens contained within prison camps, that have catchy names like Camp 14, Camp 15, and Camp 16. In addition to hard labor, other activities that regularly take place within these camps include fun things like torture, starvation, rape, and outright murder.

North Korea employs “Three Generations of Punishment”. This means that if a citizen were to be convicted of a crime, not only do they receive the punishment, but three generations of their family do as well. What better way to prevent citizens from stepping out of line than to hurt the ones they love. What a progressive and welcoming country, deserving of the western media’s affection and accolades.

Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong-un, is the vice director of North Korea’s Workers Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. That isn’t a satirical title. She is literally in charge of state-sponsored propaganda, including maintaining the cult of personality that surrounds Kim Jong-un. The media praising her is like if the media had praised Eva Braun during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Of course this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the media’s increasingly loose moral compass. What with the complete fabrication of events to push narratives, constant pushing of conspiracy theories, and outright romanticization of murderous dictator types (see Castro, Guevara, etc).

This is the very same media who increasingly glamorizes Communism in droves, like the gaggle of edgy, poorly educated children so many of them are increasingly turning out to be. Mind you, this is the same Communism responsible for levels of death, oppression, and human tragedy that far outnumber those of the Holocaust and slavery combined. We’re talking magnitudes of difference here.

Human dumpster fire and dumb person’s intellectual Jeet Heer posted the tweet below, before arrogantly disparaging all who took issue with it, and attempting to justify his idiocy with a 14 tweet barrage of damage control.

JeetHeerThis tweet is fairly par for the course in Jeet’s world though. The guy’s entire career is predicated on writing sensationalized, hyperbolic anti-Trump articles and tweets. Unfortunately, nothing Trump or Pence could possibly do will ever make Kim Jong-un or his family look good in comparison. Not even Jeet’s Trump-fueled hate boner will change this fact.

Champion of the wealthy privileged class masquerading as blue collar savior Michael Moore had this to say:

MichaelMooreThat sure is a hot take there, Captain Cholesterol. A murderous (communist) regime awkwardly unifies (strictly as a PR move) with its free capitalist counterpart to the south, and all you can see through those grease-soaked goggles is an anti-Trump event. Never mind the fact that the Koreas didn’t “come together”, so much as the south was merely being diplomatic in letting the nuisance to the north share in the Olympics (North Korea tried to have a joint Olympics in 1988 in Seoul, but were denied). Also, never mind that in spite of the hippy hug-fest John Lennon karaoke, that after the Olympics are over, North Koreans will still not have the freedoms that any other country at the Olympics get to enjoy.

Those are just two arrogant loud-mouths opining on the events however. Let’s look at some of the brilliant commentary that the actual media was laying down.

ABCNorthKoreaMatching outfits and synchronized chants? How cute! Except they didn’t get together and pick matching outfits and work out a routine to look cute. It’s unlikely that any of these women even had a say in whether they were to be at these events or not. Everything about their visit would have been dictated and controlled by the North Korean government. Their entire presence was a carefully orchestrated P.R. move, the headmaster of that propaganda being the aforementioned Kim Yo-jong.

Those whimsical masks are of a young Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. The man responsible for establishing North Korea’s current prison-state and lovely policies like the three generations of punishment. Every North Korean is legally required to display and maintain a picture of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il within their homes. These masks are akin to China showing up with Mao masks, or Italians wearing Mussolini masks. There’s nothing remotely cute about it.

NewYorkTimesKoreaWhere to even begin with this one.

For starters, it’s obvious whoever wrote this tweet had both a deep hatred of Pence and a complete ignorance of Kim. Pence is guilty of having antiquated views on homosexuality. Kim is guilty of helping run a murderous prison-state. The two aren’t even remotely comparable by any metric. Frankly, only a complete dipshit would consider anyone in the Kim family to be more diplomatic than any sitting or former U.S. president or vice president. Based on the response-to-like ratio on this tweet, most people were rational enough to feel the same way.

Keep in mind, that perhaps the reason Pence didn’t act “diplomatic” towards anyone from North Korea might be due to the fact that only eight month ago, a U.S. citizen (Otto Warmbier) was killed by Kim’s regime.

ReutersNorthKoreaReuters apparently didn’t want to be left out of the stupid tweet club. Once again, North Korea is a murderous, fascist regime, and there is absolutely nothing remotely diplomatic about them. If anything, South Korea were the diplomatic ones for letting a country implicit in the kidnapping of hundred of its citizens join them in their hosting of the Olympics.

CanadaNorthKoreaHey guys! It’s me, Canada! Let me get in on this tone-deaf posturing too!

Alright, North Mexico. What do you have to add?

North Korea sure is diplomatic!

Did you just cheat off Reuter’s homework, Canada?

No.

Are you sure, Canada?

Look over there! Trudeau’s hair looks really nice today!

Trump, Koi Fish, and the Agenda Driven Media

November 5th was a day like any other day. The sun rose in the morning. Birds started to chirp. McDonald’s opened at 5AM and started serving sub-par breakfast. Media outlets and blue check-marks threw integrity to the wind, logged into twitter, and greeted the day with their daily doses of lies and dishonesty.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was in Japan meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. While there, he took part in traditional Japanese pastimes, like playing golf, and eating hamburgers.

Then he fed some koi fish, and the hysterical man-children and women-children of the media were given the opportunity to prove they could be every bit as childish as Trump.

Both Trump and Abe were enjoying a staged photo-op, feeding koi fish from wooden boxes, flinging spoonfuls of feed down to the fishy maws below. Then PM Abe tossed the remainder of his box into the water, and President Trump followed suit.

Precisely 27 seconds later, twitter erupted with countless tweets and links to incompetently-penned click-bait articles by millennials with over-valued Communications degrees.

The basic gist of most of these tweets was: “Trump is moron. Other guy feed fish, but he dump fish food out like moron!!1!”.

Or course, this was in fact not the case, but journalism has changed a lot in the last few decades, and now D+ students are the gatekeepers of news. People who are unable to be objective and deliver a story without a blatantly partisan bias have become a rare breed within the modern media. Hence the increased volume of outright propaganda that gets passed off as actual journalism these days.

Any “journalist” very easily could have looked at the source material, done a little research, and very easily debunked the narrative that was being pushed. The simple act of watching a 30 seconds video that was readily available could have prevented dozens of goofs from posting tweets or writing articles that were so easily debunked.

Trump_IndependentThen what happened, The Independent (blue_checkmark.jpg)? Trump showed his “usual bluntness” by copying the actions of the Prime Minister of a foreign country he was visiting? The same thing all visiting Presidents do? Did Shinzo Abe, the actual Prime Minister of Japan, not know the “ritual for visiting dignitaries”, but you arrogant mouth-breathers do?

Trump_MetroTrump got impatient, did he, Metro (blue_checkmark.jpg)? He got impatient by calmly parroting the Japanese Prime Ministers actions? How do you know what Trump was told? Were you there, Metro (blue_checkmark.jpg)? You weren’t, were you? So essentially, you’re just creating an alternate narrative to push an agenda? This seems out of character for such a dependable, credible media outlet such as yourself.

Trump_Guardian“Trump dump”. That sure is a creative headline, The Guardian (blue_checkmark.jpg). Did someone with a writing degree from a college come up with that? I can’t help but notice you’re running the same false narrative as all the other outlets writing stories about this non-event. It’s good to know that British “news” organizations are just as unreliable and dishonest as their U.S. counterparts. Keep up the good work.

Trump_JezebelOn the other end of the (autism?) spectrum, we have the childish bastion of anti-intellectual, non-content known as Jezebel (blue_checkmark.jpg). This site not only posted a factually-inaccurate story (practically their business model), but refused to change it after finding out it was wrong. It’s almost as if facts and truth don’t matter at Jezebel (blue_checkmark.jpg). Sounds like an intelligent choice of places to go to get your news from.

Countless other sites posted lazy, copy-and-paste articles about this topic as well. CNN posted doctored footage, conveniently cropping out PM Shinzo Abe dumping his container first, which shouldn’t surprise anybody familiar with CNN’s level of journalistic integrity. HuffPo wrote some 5th-grade level, emotionally-based drivel that 50-year-old women with 8 cats no doubt ate up. There were many more, but I think you get the point.

The grand irony here, is that these articles represent the very #FakeNews that Trump has become known for railing against on his twitter account and at press conferences. Keep in mind, this wasn’t an incident that was easy to get wrong. These outlets either A) didn’t actually watch the footage before deciding to write and post these articles, or B) saw the footage, and still decided to write what amounts to slander. Can someone please explain to me again why trust in the media is at an all-time low?

This wouldn’t be a problem if it were merely an isolated incident, but it isn’t. Most of these sites seem to exist solely as politically-motivated propaganda machines dedicated to writing hit-pieces on a daily basis. If a politician legitimately messes up, journalists should write about it. If that person doesn’t mess up, journalists obviously shouldn’t then alter reality in order to write a negative piece about him or her. This seems like common sense to me. The fact that people still read this type of stuff and don’t question it, is quite disturbing. It’s almost like society is intellectually regressing back to the medieval era.

People are willing to believe absolutely idiotic things as long as it confirms a bias that they already hold. Hence, we’ll continue to get misleading or outright fabricated articles over the next 3 (potentially 7) years, to fuel the partisan dementia that infests social media, and provides a lucrative business model for increasingly dishonest media outlets.

Hopefully we get a Democrat in office next so that we can get back to reading all those cult of personality based fluff articles instead. It’ll be nice to be back in an era where the media outright buries and refuses to cover human right’s violations, corruption, and unconstitutional acts from politicians they share a political affiliation with. After all, that’s truly what journalistic integrity is all about.