OANN and Newsmax: Competing With Faux To Become State Media

[GreyhoundFan]

Since OAN (One America News Network) is on the rise and adored by Twitler, I figured they need their own thread.

I'll start with the article linked below. I can't bring myself to watch the daily rallies, so I don't know if the reporter actually asked this, but it would be in the OAN wheelhouse.

 

Edited November 28, 2020 by GreyhoundFan

[Cartmann99]

@GreyhoundFan, just so you know, I followed the link in the tweet, and it goes to a satirical website.

The reporter referenced in the tweet is Chanel Rion, and we had a brief discussion about her and her fiancé, Courtland Sykes back in 2018.

 

From Chanel's website:

Quote

Chanel's series promotes not only the spirit of the traditional family but the self-reliance, ingenuity, independence, and strength of American girls who believe in traditional homes, in conservative values, in having faith, and in having traditional lives and futures that encourage families to succeed at home and to create family-centered and home-centric feminine and family enterprises. But this is not the script typically foisted on girls in the name of female independence today. Chanel's series creates a world for girls who want to Make America Great Again the old fashioned way and to raise new generations of the kinds of families that always did. It will not make nail-eating radical feminists happy.

 

Chanel's "Mystery by Design" series for girls Available January 1 stands apart from the gender-hostile, Hollywood "rip and hate" spirit of radical feminism that has brought so much coldness, pain, failure and disappointment to so many young women whose lives radical feminism has twisted and irreparably ruined with its toxic and confused mental stew of pointless competition, manophobia, hatred, gender-confusion and blame that radical feminism is and has always been about. She rejects it outright and wants as many girls as she can reach to reject it too. 

 

Beyond standards of tradition and ladyship these books offer some rare learning enhancements—vocabulary training to enhance the writing and speaking skills and what linguists call the non-passive or "active vocabulary" for millions of American girls trapped in failing school zones where last year's international test results ranked America in a disgraceful 26th place behind third world countries and in an America where public schools are so lackadaisical and busy failing and bending people's natural genders and changing signs on restrooms, that most don't have time or apparently know-how left to even teach cursive writing anymore—no less to expand vocabularies.

I would think that Chanel's job with OAN would go directly against her and Courtland's views on the proper roles of women, since she has to leave her home in order to do her job. Also, if these two are such fans of traditional family life, then why haven't they gotten married yet?

Edited April 19, 2020 by Cartmann99
I no write good.

[GreyhoundFan]

Chanel is a piece of work. I've seen her referenced several times recently and she inevitably makes me roll my eyes and become nauseous.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is just lovely /sarcasm:

 

[Cartmann99]

I'm disappointed that they didn't shoehorn the shape-shifting lizard people into their conspiracy.

I'm unable to get the videos to play after embedding, so here's a link to the tweets if you're having the same issue- https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1259185075436093440

If you are asking what is this Plandemic referenced in the tweet above, it's a preview for a "documentary" that offers up the conspiracy theorist explanation for the pandemic.

Article about Dr. Judy Mikovits who is shown in the clip from OAN.

Quote

Back in 2011, we covered the strange story of biochemist Judy Mikovits, who co-authored a controversial (and subsequently retracted) paper in the journal Science and eventually lost her prestigious position with a research institution. Now Mikovits is back in the news, having spent the ensuing years reinventing herself as a staunch anti-vaccine crusader.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given her a new conspiracy to tout, this time targeting Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, who has become a prominent public spokesperson during the outbreak. Two interviews in particular have been spreading rapidly on social media, prompting YouTube and Facebook to remove both video clips for spreading medical misinformation during a global pandemic—a violation of their current policies

In 2007, Mikovits met Robert Silverman at a conference. Silverman had co-discovered a retrovirus known as XMRV, closely related to a known virus from mice. He told her he had found XMRV sequences in specimens from prostate cancer patients, although other labs, using different sets of patients, could find no evidence of a viral infection. Nonetheless, this prompted Mikovits to use the same tools to look for XMRV in samples from patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)—a disorder some had claimed was purely psychosomatic. 

In 2009, Mikovits co-authored the now-retracted Science paper, reporting evidence of the XMRV retrovirus in samples from patients suffering from CFS, suggesting it might cause the condition. It was retracted after other laboratories failed to replicate the results, and subsequent tests revealed the original results to be the result of sample contamination.

But Mikovits refused to back down from her claims. She was fired as research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease for "insubordination" after refusing to supply a cell line used in her work to a former collaborator. In perhaps the strangest twist of all, Mikovits was briefly arrested after absconding with her lab notebooks and computer files—legally the property of the institute.

This transformed Mikovits into a martyr for the cause in the eyes of many CFS sufferers, frustrated at having their disorder repeatedly dismissed and eager to latch onto a possible concrete biological cause. She became their champion, and their efforts to defend her sometimes turned dark. The most aggressive actions included bombarding researchers with freedom of information requests, lodging complaints with university ethics committees, and falsely accusing individual scientists of being paid by drug and insurance companies. Occasionally, there were even death threats. As Ars' John Timmer observed nine years ago:

It's no surprise that patients who frequently had their disorder treated with dismissiveness would respond positively to indications that it had a concrete, biological cause. But demonizing scientists who don't support something that appeals to you is never going to end well, especially when all indications are that the scientists are being careful and thorough. Unfortunately, we're now seeing more of this sort of behavior in areas as diverse as climate change, vaccine safety, and animal research.

Now Judy Mikovits is back as a patron saint of science denial. According to Retraction Watch, she spoke at the 2014 Autism One conference. Her talk included a slide with the self-aggrandizing title, "The best scientist in jail story since Galileo." Last month, she published a book with Autism One co-founder Kent Heckenlively. Like most authors, she has been aggressively promoting it, repeating all manner of outlandish claims in the process.

In addition to appearing in a 25-minute YouTube clip from a forthcoming antivaxx pseudo-"documentary" called Plandemic, Mikovits was recently a guest on Patrick Bet-David's popular YouTube podcast. She claimed that the current pandemic is caused by a flu vaccine from the 2010s and that wearing a mask would somehow activate the coronavirus. She also claimed that Fauci—whom she blames for "sabotaging" her CFR research—should be charged with treason. (Another attempt to smear Fauci with allegations of sexual assault backfired when the accuser had second thoughts and admitted she had been paid to make the accusation.)

This is all nonsense, of course. But the spread of these kinds of baseless conspiracy theories comes with a very real human cost. Not only has Fauci received death threats and been forced to beef up his personal security since he became a target, but other lives could be lost.

Retraction Watch has a useful list of its many posts following the Mikovits case, including the retractions, her arrest, and her unsuccessful lawsuit against her former employer. Noted health journalist Tara Haelle has a helpful list of science-based sources over at Forbes, debunking the specific claims made in the Plandemic clip, as well as tips for how to deal with friends or family members who share the video on social media. There's an ongoing debate about how best to deal with this kind of harmful misinformation: ignore it or try to debunk it? The jury is still out on the most effective defense. Haelle falls firmly on the latter side:

"If you don’t push back on them, even to those you love or don’t want to upset, you’re enabling them. You’re allowing people to spew harmful, dangerous nonsense that kills people and demoralizes the millions of health care providers trying to save lives. Many people try to avoid drama or debates on their social media accounts, and I respect that. But this video is not a time to “agree to disagree” because the stakes are too high. It’s a matter of life and death. The false statements in this video can cause deaths."

Zubin Damania, a physician who hosts a YouTube channel as ZDoggMD, opted to forego the kinder, gentler approach Haelle advocates. He reluctantly addressed the Plandemic video at the request of viewers, expressing shock that anyone would be taken in by its easily debunked assertions, and that somehow the clip has racked up over one million views. "The first five seconds of that video reeks of crazy sauce and no one can recognize that?" he ranted. “Don’t waste your time watching it. Don’t waste your time sharing it. Don’t waste your time talking about it. I can’t believe I’m wasting my time doing this. But I just want to stop getting messages about it.”

On the plus side, his impassioned three-minute rant has racked up more than two million views in two days. May it continue to be shared far and wide, even though it probably won't change the minds of hardcore conspiracy theorists.

 

 

Edited May 10, 2020 by Cartmann99
Trying to fix technical difficulties

[AmericanRose]

Yep. As COVID-19 becomes impossible to ignore, people are shifting from "it's being exagerated" to "IT WAS PLANNED TO HURT TRUMP." Should have seen that one coming.

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree with Rick's assessment of the future of OANN and Faux:

 

[fraurosena]

On 5/13/2020 at 9:28 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

I agree with Rick's assessment of the future of OANN and Faux:

 

Slight nuance: Trump et al are planning to buy OANN, merge it with the data operation from the campaign and spin off Trump TV.

Except it won't happen. They'll all be way too busy in court being prosecuted for all the crimes they committed whilst he was in office. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[JMarie]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Spoiler

This is the article the OAN reporter is referring to.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/22/blue-state-blues-the-case-for-pardoning-barack-obama/

President Donald Trump should preemptively pardon former President Barack Obama for any crimes he may have committed in “Obamagate,” the effort by the previous administration to frame the incoming one for “Russia collusion.”

Attorney General William Barr said on Monday: “The law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president,” i.e. against Trump.

He added that the ongoing investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham will “determine whether there were any federal laws broken” in the effort to undermine Trump. “And if there were, those who broke the laws will be held to account.”

The most-reported line from Barr’s press conference was that he did not expect there to be a criminal indictment of Obama or of former Vice President Joe Biden. But he also added that was “based on the information I have today.”

Thus far, we know that President Obama was aware of, and may even have directed, the snooping on incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. However, is it not clear that Obama’s involvement reached a criminal level. Some members of the outgoing administration may have believed — sincerely, if wrongly — that there was something to the “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory spun by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic Party and the FBI.

Just as there was a legitimate national interest in finding out whether Vice President Biden had been compromised by his son’s dubious dealings with Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company — even though the revelations may have helped Trump’s re-election chances — so, too, there was arguably a national interest in 2017 in finding out if the incoming administration was compromised by Russia, even if the basis for that suspicion turned out to be fraudulent.

Obama may have had additional motives to monitor Flynn, beyond personal pique (he had fired Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, for which Flynn repaid him by campaigning for Trump). Obama may have wanted to protect the Iran deal, which Flynn opposed. Obama also wanted to punish Israel on his way out the door by allowing a U.N. Security Council resolution that declared the Jewish State’s presence in the historic capital of Jerusalem illegal.

The incoming administration had a very different policy toward Israel. So the President-elect’s team mobilized to prevent the resolution from passing, if possible — perhaps even by convincing Russia to oppose it. That probably accounted for some of Flynn’s conversations with Russia in December 2016. And just as Obama spied on Americans during the Iran deal debate, he was prepared to do so again to make sure the anti-Israel resolution went through.

But once the authorities knew the “Russia” suspicions were baseless — that Flynn was just coordinating policy —  they should have stopped. We now know that then-FBI Director James Comey told Obama that Flynn had not passed classified information to Russia. (We know it thanks to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who recently declassified the last portion of an email that Susan Rice, Flynn’s predecessor, wrote before leaving office.)

Yet Obama allowed the monitoring to continue. We know that he also gave Comey the green light to share the most salacious contents of the phony “Steele dossier” with Trump the next day — partly to see what his reaction would be. Vice President Biden was in the room on Jan. 5, 2017, when that happened. Comey admits that he took things further, sending agents to trap Flynn in the White House. We do not know who leaked Flynn’s name to the Washington Post, which may have been illegal, but we know the FBI leaked like a sieve. None of that was in the national interest.

So we seem to have two efforts to pursue Flynn and the incoming administration. One, coordinated by Obama, was shielded by the pretext of the national interest. Another, possibly centered around Comey, had nothing to do with national interests and may have been driven by his desire to compensate for his role in inadvertently electing Trump.

It could be that Obama’s actions — in which Biden took part, at least passively — set events in motion that had the foreseeable consequence that crimes might be committed — crimes described by Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, as including obstruction of justice.

It is also possible that the people who committed those crimes took matters a step further than Obama intended, or could have foreseen. And executive privilege could make the truth harder to find.

Barr warmed against “a tit for tat exercise,” politicizing justice or “lower[ing] the standards” just to punish Obama for doing the same. “Not every abuse of power, no matter how outrageous, is necessarily a federal crime,” he cautioned.

Still, if the goal is to restore public confidence in the justice system, the only way is to wipe the slate clean. And the only way to do that would be for Trump to pardon Obama and Biden, preemptively, for the sake of national unity.

It would, of course, drive Obama, Biden, the Democrats, and the media crazy. Pardoning Obama and Biden would, by itself, imply that they had done something wrong — which is exactly why Trump might find it politically useful.

But beyond politics, the only practical course may be one in which the aggrieved party himself ends the cycle of investigation — at least regarding the former president and vice president. And let the rest of them face justice.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

One of the reasons #BunkerBitch loves them so much:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s most loyal media ally promised a pro-Trump poll. It didn’t deliver — and then pulled its story."

Spoiler

CNN’s release of a poll this week showing President Trump trailing former vice president Joe Biden by 14 points nationally clearly rattled the president and his reelection campaign. In short order, Trump tweeted out a memo making various allegations about how and why CNN conducted the poll, each assertion ludicrous and easily debunked. On Wednesday, the campaign escalated its efforts to portray CNN’s poll as unfair, demanding that CNN retract the poll and issue an apology.

CNN’s attorneys, with complete and understandable justification, declined to do so.

The network is one of Trump’s most frequent targets for criticism. He has repeatedly bashed CNN’s reporting and on-air talent, disparaging the network as hopelessly biased against him. Trump’s taste in television coverage runs more along the lines of Fox News’s Sean Hannity, a fervent supporter of the president, and, in recent months, One America News.

OAN is a small network, clearly seeking to make its name in part by promising endlessly obsequious coverage of the president. The network has often explicitly asked Trump to watch it instead of Fox, as chief executive Robert Herring did Wednesday.

Trump does watch. It was an OAN report about the protester in Buffalo who was injured by police that prompted Trump to speculate wildly that the elderly man who suffered a head injury had faked his fall in service to a murky network of left-wing anarchists.

Herring defended that report Thursday, writing on Twitter that his network had “put out our facts” on the incident, while the mainstream media hadn’t done so. There is no evidence for the claims made in the report, though OAN reporter Kristian Rouz did certainly offer up some allegations.

That tweet was followed up with another attempt to goad the mainstream media.

Herring had on Wednesday pledged an upcoming poll, as the Trump campaign’s feud with CNN over its national poll was heating up. He promised that OAN would be “releasing a poll concerning the 2020 presidential race” that “looks as though it will be in favor of” the president.

Early Thursday afternoon, the poll came out. Conducted by Gravis Marketing, a pollster that earns a C in FiveThirtyEight’s ranking of pollsters, it was focused solely on Florida.

It had Trump and Biden tied in the must-win state for Trump, a state Trump won narrowly four years ago.

OAN produced a video segment on the poll, again featuring Rouz, which appeared on its website. Soon after it was published, though, the report was pulled. A tweet from Herring that apparently announced the results was also deleted.

Both the page and the video report were captured, however. The image above comes from Google’s cache; the report can be seen on YouTube thanks to writer Arieh Kovler.

The poll itself and Rouz’s report on the poll immediately raise red flags in a variety of ways.

For example, it shows a 50-50 tie between Biden and Trump. Polls don’t normally result in perfect 50-50 ties, unless respondents are forced to choose between the two candidates. That appears to be what happened in this case, as Kovler notes; at another point in Rouz’s report, he reveals that Trump leads Biden 53 percent to 47 percent among undecided voters.

What does that mean? It means that Biden necessarily leads among voters who have made up their minds. Imagine that half of voters say they’re undecided. To get a 50-50 result overall, Biden would need to lead Trump 53 to 47 among decided voters if Trump led by the same margin among undecideds.

Rouz didn’t mention that detail.

Lots of bad news for Trump is glossed over in the same way. Trump is presented as having an edge over Biden on handling the economy. But this point, one central to Trump’s reelection bid, downplays that Trump is under 50 percent among respondents and leads Biden by only four points, basically a tie.

Many of the other data points that Rouz highlights are based on leading questions (“Is activating the national guard an effective way to prevent further rioting?”) or are presented by Rouz in ludicrously loaded language.

At one point, he shows the results of a question about where blame lies for violence that emerged following protests throughout the country.

“The OAN/Gravis poll reveals 43 percent of Floridians blame far-left protesters for the latest violence and looting,” he said, “while only 36 percent blame the police.”

First, Rouz’s presentation of the question doesn’t match what’s shown on the screen, nor did the response options. (The question asked only about “protesters,” not “far-left protesters.”) Second, and more important, a seven-point difference is hardly anything definitive, given that the difference is probably not statistically significant, depending on the margin of error of the poll.

Or it’s like when Rouz claimed that “at least 50 percent of Floridians would vote to reelect their president if the election were held this week” — an impressive use of “at least” and an equally impressive effort to ignore that the same thing could be said about Biden. And Rouz’s framing works only if you assume those undecided voters actually vote for Trump at the margin they indicated they would.

The OAN report tries to suggest that this result is somehow a repudiation of CNN’s poll. It isn’t, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious, of course, is that the CNN poll was national and the OAN poll conducted only in Florida. Florida polling from other outlets shows Biden with a narrow lead in the state of about three points on average.

Meaning that if, say, a third of respondents in OAN’s poll said they were undecided, Biden could be leading Trump 52 to 48 among voters who have made up their minds. That puts the OAN/Gravis poll very much in line with other polling in the state.

That Rouz is so sloppy and presents the findings so dishonestly should not be a surprise. He has another report that was published by OAN on Thursday. It is a buffet of allegations that would resonate with Trump: The “deep state” is working with Democrats to produce polls making Republican voters demoralized. It’s lifting up one of the dumber points of contention Trump’s team raised in its criticism of the CNN poll but somehow manages to do so in an even more ridiculous way.

This entire polling effort by OAN is a remarkable, if unintentional, window into how the network works. Its chief executive trumpets a poll that he promises is likely to show Trump doing well. His on-air reporter gins up a thoroughly misleading presentation of results that are far from great for the president. For some reason — but probably exactly that reason — the story and the report get deep-sixed.

After all, Trump’s not going to want to watch that. We don’t want him switching over to Fox, now, do we?

 

[Cartmann99]

I figured it was time for the places that make Faux look sane to have their own thread:

In case you missed it:

Part one

Part two

Edited to add: Thank you @GreyhoundFan for combining my thread with yours. I completely forgot that we already had one.

Edited November 28, 2020 by Cartmann99

[GreyhoundFan]

I can't imagine watching or listening to Chanel Rion voluntarily. I value my brain cells.

[Cartmann99]

It's fun watching him attack the people who helped him so much:

[Becky]

OAN- isn’t that the one where the news readers look and sound like little girls playing dressup? 

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, Becky said:

OAN- isn’t that the one where the news readers look and sound like little girls playing dressup? 

Tomi Lahren got her start with them.

 

[Becky]

55 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Tomi Lahren got her start with them.

 

Exactly!!  LOL! Little girl pretending to gravitas. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

Greg Kelly is one of the hosts on Newsmax.

I may loathe Ted Cruz with every fiber of my being, but I don't believe for a minute that he thinks this case will appear before the Supreme Court. Cruz wants to be president one day, and this is part of his plan to get Trump supporters on his side for that run.

[Becky]

The thought of President Ted Cruz makes me nauseous. 

[Cartmann99]

[Cartmann99]

If you hurry, you can still catch the show with Mike Lindell.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

39 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

If you hurry, you can still catch the show with Mike Lindell.

 

Shucks, I had some grout to scrub. That was far more interesting and less annoying than that lineup of asswipes.

[Cartmann99]

On the premise of making hay while the sun is shining, I don't understand why one of the nutjob stations hasn't given Mike Lindell a show. The Trumpers love him, and some sane people would watch for the trainwreck factor, so why the hell not?