The legacy dam wall is cracking , long live social media

It's obvious, as Mandy Rice Davies might observe, that as a blogger and tweeter, I'd agree with the sentiments here:

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-grim-future-of-establishment-journalism/

In one sense, the problem is an old one. To work in a newsroom is to be exposed to intense and continuous dishonesty. 

The dissimulation comes in various forms: spin, outright lying, misleading but true facts, half-truths, quarter-truths, lack of context, sly exaggeration, selective amnesia, deceptive jargon, false statistics, sleazy personal attacks. After about a year any journalist with reasonable powers of observation will notice that they are working in a forest of lies.

There is no legal obligation for people talking to the media to tell the truth, but decent journalists attempt to counter the mendacity. Although they are always outgunned, they put up a fight in an attempt to present as much truth as possible.

That fight has all but disappeared.

Yes indeed.  The tricks of the MSM trade are then posted and discussed in the article ... I'm going to f fwd past that and turn the spotlight onto us, the soc-media writers, whether on blog or tweet or gab. Sooner or later, by a process of attrition, being caught out by scams, by trolls, by all of that ... we learn the ropes ... or should.  If not, then there's scarcely any point.

Meanwhile, the previously Woke (or just MSM fed normies) wake up one by one ... it almost never goes the other way and that's where longtimers in this blogging game have an issue. 

What of those newcomers who have genuinely broken the spell, people such as Naomi Wolf, former feminazi ... or those who claim they have, such as Tulsi Gabbard?  What should our attitude be towards new allies?

Caution, I'd say, with a welcoming smile, knowing there is many a trap laid.  

And it's a minefield, with the most ridiculous stances by the bad side. In that first Trump debate v Clinton, the Demrat adjudicator was trying on this "factchecker" bollox, earpiece in ear ... the rules stated that neither candidate could go outside to consult during the break and yet Clinton had "special dispensation" to do just that and footage showed her consulting ... etc. etc.

Now watch the flat denial that that happened. Watch carefully anyone at all, e.g. Snopes or Politico or Real Clear Politics and the claim to be "impartial", with no a priori political convictions whatever.  It's an out and out lie.

I occasionally quote Sir Norman Anderson, in Lawyer Among Theologians, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1973, p15, about the quality of the criticism of so-called intellectuals:

"At times [I am] astonished by the way in which they handle their evidence, by the presuppositions and a priori convictions with which some of them clearly (and even, on occasion, on their own admission) approach the documents concerned, and by the positively staggering assurance with which they make categorical pronouncements on points which are, on any showing, open to question, and on which equally competent colleagues take a diametrically opposite view."

As I wrote in a post elsewhere this morning ... follow the money ...  this was Deep Throat's dictum to Woodward in All the President's Men but a bit of thought and we'd add "immunity from payout" plus "immunity from prosecution" as powerful motivators to lie, to act shoddily.

A far safer way is to accept that everyone is biased, at least a little, we dig and find what we said, then what they said, then consult the folders of snippets we picked up over the years and form an initial opinion.  Meanwhile, organisations with heavy motivation due to all the factors listed are quite onesided, whilst stubbornly claiming to be unbiased.

How will normies ever catch up with the liars both in MSM and plants in soc-med?  Sadly, only when events catch up with them.  So far, mainly Pfizer has been under the hammer, now and then Moderna, today at the Daily Sceptic it was AstraZeneca.  It's just a question of time until Hancock, for one, is nailed.