Speaking to Tucker Carlson, he called attention to the way that the West has been criminalizing the platforming of Russian media outlets. It’s a big departure from the Cold War, when mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times would regularly publish speeches that were given by Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

He told Carlson: “Now it’s practically criminalized.”

He pointed out how obvious this was when the conflict between Russia and Ukraine first escalated in February of 2022. He said: “One of the very first steps [the EU] took legislatively was to ban the platforming, to criminalize the platforming of Russian media, like RT and Sputnik. They made it a crime, and YouTube immediately pulled it off because they didn’t want their citizens hearing any information from the Russian perspective.”

This is putting us at a disadvantage by preventing us from getting a better idea of their viewpoints, he says.

“I mean, you can hate Russia, you can think Russia’s evil, you can think whatever you want about Russia, but why wouldn’t you want to hear from the other side?” he asked.

Carlson agreed, saying that a speech he heard from Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he announced his military operation was very insightful. He said that most Americans aren’t aware of what Putin is thinking, and he doesn’t understand why people want to remain ignorant.

Greenwald and Carlson concluded that this is due, at least in part, to the fact that “propaganda works.”

Russian state media target of censorship campaigns

The media outlet RT has been described by the U.S. State Department as a major part of the Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign and was blocked in the European Union and Canada in 2022. However, replicas of its articles appear on numerous other websites, and there has been a concerted effort to try to stop its message from spreading.

German Marshall Fund senior fellow Bret Schafer said: “It was quite evident when we were running the search results in the E.U. that if Russian propaganda is not showing up on Russian domains, it’s getting through, which is sort of a double whammy because it’s not just evading restrictions and bans, it’s doing so on sites that are less transparent than RT itself.”

YouTube blocked global access to all channels that are affiliated with RT and has taken steps to remove what it claims is “harmful misinformation.”

RT acknowledged in a statement that its content doesn’t follow the “U.S. State Department/NATO party line” but is glad to hear its content is reaching different platforms and users.

In September, Facebook owner Meta said that it would be banning RT along with Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media outlets from all of its platforms, which include WhatsApp and Instagram, on the grounds that they allegedly used deceptive tactics to conduct influence operations online.

“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” the social media company said in a written statement.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the world should treat RT’s activities like they would covert intelligence operations.

Sources for this article include:

• RT.com
• NYTimes.com
• Reuters.com

Nobody is more apoplectic about it all than legacy media. Some are trying to play nice. Others are abandoning the little sanity they have left. But there are a few that are actually trying to figure out how to continue their existence under the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, transgender members of the military appear to be on their way out. We covered this and other topics, including why President Trump should NOT allow his appointees to have their backgrounds checked by the FBI, on today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show.

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The people don’t trust the media. It’s not because of the Trump victory. In fact, one can argue that the Trump victory is indicative of the paradigm shift away from the “Arbiters of Truth” with a far greater emphasis on independent journalists and public sharing sites like 𝕏.

Now that the election is over, it’s time to pay the piper. According to The Post Millennial:

The Associated Press (AP) acknowledged its financial problems Monday as it began offering buyout packages to some employees and laying off others, downsizing by 8 percent. The go-to news organization that has been providing stories that are ready to print or broadcast for decades is downsizing as it focuses on digital news gathering, the outlet reported. Some major oulets have stopped buying its conent. 

The AP is experiencing some of the financial losses that other mainstream media outlets have seen accelerate in recent years. CNN is also reportedly laying off hundreds of staff, including on-air talent, before the end of the year. The oultlet said those who qualify for a buyout, which includes severance pay and some healthcare insurance for 18 months, would be informed by the end of business on Monday. Those getting axed would get the news in the next few weeks.

Some of the AP’s issues accelerated in 2024 when both the Gannett and McClatchy news chains, which control around 230 outlets including USA today, said they would no longer purchase news from the outlet. Although the outlet sells its materials directly to the consumer on the internet, much of its business is still conducted with member news outlets who pay a monthly or yearly fee for access.

The AP, founded in 1846, used to pride itself on being the largest news service in the world, providing news with reporters stationed around the globe. The AP has said that less than half of those affected would be directly producing the news.

A news and media union, the News Media Guild, revealed that 121 members would get buyouts from the company, however the outlet would not confirm the numbers exactly.

“We all know this is a time of transformation in the media sector,” Daisy Veerasingham, the AP’s president and CEO, told staff in a Monday morning memo. “Our customers — both who they are and what they need from us — are changing rapidly. This is why we’ve focused on delivering a digital-first news report. We now need to accelerate on this path.”

The people are awakening and their information gatekeepers are running out of sleeping pills. This bodes well for the incoming Trump administration.

They’re desperate and terrified because they need Trump if they have any hope of surviving as a network. So, they sent their most famous married show hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, to beg Trump to help them with their ratings.

Of course, they claimed it was to “open communications” moving forward, as if this is some grand gesture of goodwill instead of their attempt to mitigate an existential threat. In reality, they played on Trump’s ego and kissed the ring like Amerigo Bonasera asking Vito Corleone for help in the opening scene of The Godfather.

“Be my friend?” he asked.

Joe and Mika asked the same.

https://twitter.com/LangmanVince/status/1858483686397592031

The pair, who Trump has called “Psycho Joe” and “Crazy Mika” in the seven years since they last spoke, were likely begged if not threatened by MSNBC executives. Corporate media as a whole cannot afford to be ignored by Trump or his administration. Many things are going to be happening over the next four years and any legacy news outlet that wants to survive will need to be talking with the administration, not just about them.

This isn’t just about Trump, though. It’s about Trump’s growing base of supporters who proved on Election Day that the lies of corporate media are no longer driving their thoughts. If corporate media can no longer be the “Arbiters of Truth” that they’ve pretended to be in the past, then they’ll need to be the disseminators of the Trump agenda if they want to keep an audience.

This one is a first for me.

The radical leftist posted a short but potent critique of how Democrats view their corporate media lapdogs and it’s actually spot on.

Democrats view media as marketing. That’s why they get so angry when any left-wing media doesn’t agree with them 100%. And they got used to mainstream media, like Morning Joe and The View, being pure propaganda for them. So, they’ve developed a very unhealthy entitlement complex.

There’s a lot @joerogan doesn’t agree with Trump on, but Trump didn’t give a shit. He took the win. Democrats think it’s unacceptable unless the host agrees ahead of time to give them everything. They’ll take nothing instead. Ok, well that’s what you wound up with – nothing.

It fundamentally misunderstands the current media dynamics. You’re not getting it – we don’t need you, you need us. How many elections are the Democrats going to lose before they figure this out?

To be fair, it’s mostly corporate media’s fault they’re treated this way by Democrats. They bowed before Barack Obama and then never stood back up to face future Democrats. They got so used to kissing his butt that they started kissing whatever blue butt was in front of their faces.

It’s a crude visually, but it’s accurate.

As I’ve long said, the far left and the far right share a common disdain for mainstream interests. Granted, the far left has been willing to ignore those interests as they pertain to the media because it has benefitted their side for so long, but that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the hypocrisy. Uygur is just voicing something he’s known clearly for a very long time.

The funny (or sad, depending upon your perspective) part about all of this is that corporate media would be MORE effective at promoting their UniParty Swamp puppet masters if they pushed back against them sometimes. There’s a reason why 𝕏 as a platform and podcasting as a medium are viewed more favorably than corporate media and left-aligned Big Tech.

It’s not because there are no Democrats on 𝕏; there are actually more Democrats than Republicans there.

It’s not because there are no leftist podcasts; some of the most powerful podcasters, including Rogan, are or were Democrats.

The reason corporate media has sunk so low on the trust scale is because they’ve become agenda-driven instead of truth-driven. That has always been the case to some extent, but over the last eight years it has become so commonplace that members of corporate media are no longer trying to hide their biases. They hate Trump and they’re willing to admit it. They hate Trump’s supporters and they no longer disguise their disdain.

The big concern for conservatives shouldn’t be media continuing on their unhinged, leftist path. The longer they do it, the less they’ll be trusted. The real concern for conservatives is if corporate media wakes up and starts reporting facts instead of narratives. of course, that would take a complete overhaul and it’s unlikely any of them have the stomach for that.

Whatever energy, spirit, or superpower one wants to attribute to the phenomenon, it’s definitely real. Henry Ford broke it down for the individual with his famous quote, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

It works even better on a mass scale. If a large group of people can be convinced that something is going to happen, it often does even if outside forces point to a different outcome. This is important on Election Day because corporate media is in the process of trying to convince the world that Kamala Harris can win.

Here’s a snapshot from Google News “Full Coverage” of their top story this morning:

None of those headlines are accurate. The first one is particularly egregious in its gaslighting because the Kamala Harris campaign is in full-blown panic mode while the Trump campaign is trying their best not to seem overconfident.

Corporate media, upon orders from their UniParty Swamp and Deep State commanders, are trying to get Democrats pumped up so they can manufacture a win. At least that’s what they’re being told, and let’s hope that’s true. The alternative is ugly.

Donald Trump is on the brink of a massive landslide victory. As much as I hate public polls, it’s telling that the most accurate poll from 2020, Atlas Intel, has him winning all of the battleground states while being competitive in Minnesota and Virginia. Add New Hampshire to that list and likely a couple of “surprise” tight races in blue states and Trump should coast to well over 300 Electoral College votes and a majority of the popular votes.

In a free and fair electoral process based on legal American citizen voters, it’s possible that we could have results on election night. Of course, the caveat is “free and fair.” That’s very unlikely to happen unless the Democrats’ internal polling shows Trump achieved his goal of “too big to rig.”

This is why I’m relatively confident (slighting over 50% chance) that the sudden surge of unified gaslighting by corporate media trying to tell us that Kamala is going to happen is pure hopium. If not, then we’re witnessing their attempt to suspend disbelief. In that scenario, they’re prepared to steal the election and they need as many Americans as possible to disregard everything we’ve seen for the last month so we can accept the false results they have planned.

I’m not going to elaborate on the potential for a stolen election. We’ll cross that unfortunate bridge if it happens, but I don’t think it will. Every single indicator points to a Trump landslide. The only reason more pollsters and analysts aren’t saying it is because most of them hope it’s not true.

Let’s assume the indicators are right and corporate media is lying. That’s not exactly a tough pill for most Americans to swallow, not with trust in corporate media at an all-time low.

The only thing we should trust is that God is in control. If He wants Trump in the White House again, there’s no measure of cheating that can overpower His will. And if our judgment is due and Kamala is His choice, then we need to buckle up and brace ourselves.

Ephesians 6:11 comes to mind: Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

Don’t fear. Fight the good fight. Take care of yourself and your family no matter what happens with this crazy election. God is in control but He hears us. Otherwise prayer and free will would be meaningless.

For those who are not Bible-believing Christians, think positively about the outcome of this election with confidence that Donald Trump and his supporters have done enough to earn this victory. For Bible-believing Christians, do the same but throw in a prayer for good measure.

Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who are famous for reporting on Watergate while working at the Washington Post, released a statement stating their disappointment. Former executive editor Martin Baron called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Nineteen Washington Post columnists signed an op-ed calling the lack of an endorsement a “terrible mistake.” And the unions of both publications released statements expressing their concern over such a move.

Across the board, the cited concern is that we are just days away from a consequential election where one of the candidates poses a major threat to democracy itself. The rest of the media see the billionaires who own each outlet as “preemptively self-censoring” themselves to avoid offending Donald Trump. This “self-censorship” then, we’re told, makes it more likely that Trump will get elected.

The assumptions that underlie these concerns are worth unpacking. The first, and perhaps most foolish notion, is that an endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post will be a consequential factor in this election. The audience of both papers already skews heavily Democrat. Also, it is no mystery to anyone who spends as little as thirty seconds scrolling through editorial headlines that the papers’ editors support Harris over Trump, and why.

A short look at the opinion and news stories in either paper is also enough to dispel the notion that either outlet’s executives are worried about displeasing Trump. Even in the “hard news” sections, Trump is framed as an unhinged fascist set to destroy the country to nurse his fragile ego, while Harris is a serious, stern, problem-solving public servant who, at worst, has made a few tactical mistakes on the campaign trail. No honest observer can seriously say these papers are “staying silent” about this election.

Above all, the intensity of the meltdown we’re seeing from media figures both inside and outside of these two publications reveals how profoundly out-of-touch most of the establishment media is about their own importance.

There was a time, mainly back in the mid-to-late-1800s, when the public got virtually all its news from newspapers. It’s hard to overstate how much power that put in the hands of the printers, and later editors and executives, who produced these papers.

As we go about our lives, we are constantly building and refining an internal model of reality that helps us better act to achieve our desired ends. Much of this model is fashioned from our own experience or the experience of our friends and families—which gets shared with us through advice and stories. To understand all parts of the world that exist outside the experience of ourselves and those we personally know, we rely on media. In the nineteenth century, the media consisted almost exclusively of books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

Because our internal models of reality are indistinguishable from reality itself and newspapers were effectively the sole source of information about current events, newspaper editors exerted an enormous amount of control over how the population saw the world. And their near-monopoly over public discourse about current events gave them a lot of authority when analyzing or endorsing the actions of politicians.

As other forms of media gained traction, however, the dominance of newspapers began to wane. That started with magazines—the first truly national news outlets—and it really accelerated with the rise of radio and television news. But the high cost of starting a new publication and the government’s early seizure of the airwaves kept control over the information space mostly in the hands of a small, establishment-friendly group.

That changed in the 1990s with the introduction of internet blogs. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could reach readers without filters, editors, or space constraints. It wasn’t obvious at first, but with this one seemingly-innocuous development, the establishment’s monopoly on the information space was shattered forever.

Now, three decades later, the consequences of such a change are much harder to ignore. From Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the campaigns of Ron Paul and later Donald Trump at home, to the Arab Spring and the passage of Brexit abroad, the internet has changed the world. Not only because it allowed people to see and hear dissenting views, but because it showed people that those views were popular.

In an election this close, neither candidate has been able to ignore the new reality we find ourselves in. Both Harris and Trump have appeared on popular podcasts, with Trump making such appearances a central part of his campaign. Last week, Trump sat for a three-hour discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, which is technically the most-watched talk show of any kind in the world by far.

Trump’s appearance on Rogan has been viewed nearly forty million times on YouTube alone (Spotify and Apple Podcasts don’t publish download numbers, but both also account for a large portion of Rogan’s listenership, so the total number is likely much higher.) The interview towers over Kamala Harris’s recent interview with Fox News, which, at 8 million viewers, had been celebrated as the highest-rated interview of the 2024 election. The internet is no longer a sideshow in our media environment. It’s the main stage.

Which is why it’s absurd to see an absolute meltdown over whether two newspapers print formal endorsements for one of the candidates. The panic can only be understood as a symptom of the legacy media being unable or unwilling to face the fact that they are no longer the main force influencing and controlling how the public sees the world.

The establishment press does still pose a serious threat with all the various ways they distort our perceptions of the truth in ways that are politically-expedient for them and their friends in government. But the hysteria last week over the withdrawn editorial endorsements demonstrates that many are still hyper-focused on some media practices that today are largely irrelevant. And that’s grounds for optimism.

New data from Bloomberg shows the story count for “Trump Hitler” in MSM jumped to a mindboggling 5,500 this week – the most massive total count in the ten years Deep State muppets in MSM have called Trump a Hitler/Nazi. This is a clear indication that Biden-Obama-Harris radicals and their billionaire funders are getting increasingly desperate.

"Trump Hitler" story count pic.twitter.com/lP6pG6f6S6

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 26, 2024

On X, conservative commentator Liz Churchill showed MSM’s information war against the American people in headlines.

The blitzkrieg of hate by Democrats started with Kamala Harris…

NOW – Kamala Harris: "Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the death of six million Jews."pic.twitter.com/Ncf68d853x

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 23, 2024

Harris’ accusation that Trump “wants generals like Hitler had” is based on a hearsay claim from Gen. John Kelly. This is the same man that Trump fired while in office for incompetence. The same man that claimed in 2023 that Trump called military casualties “suckers” and “losers.”  There is no proof to verify any of Kelly’s assertions.

Democrats defaulting to the ‘Trump is Hitler’ playbook are signs of desperation, especially after this…

• WaPo Editor Quits, Staff Has Total Meltdown After Non-Endorsement Of Kamala Harris
• “Dangerous Times” – LATimes Editor Quits After Owner Strikes Down Kamala Endorsement
• The Most Accurate Pollster In 2020 Has Blockbuster Polls For Trump

Here’s what X users are saying about the Bloomberg data just nine days before the presidential election:

It's their last chance. They're desperate.

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) October 26, 2024

The lack of creativity on display is painful

— ivanhoe (@skivanhoe) October 26, 2024

so when he's actually in office nobody thinks he's hitler, weird how that works

— omni (@omnius_eacc) October 26, 2024

so when he's actually in office nobody thinks he's hitler, weird how that works

— omni (@omnius_eacc) October 26, 2024

She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

It isn’t just FEMA. It isn’t just Doug Emhoff hitting a woman. It isn’t even the direct attacks against free speech that make our Corporate Media Industrial Complex so evil. The fact that they will only report on pro-Kamala or anti-Trump stories makes them true enemies of the people, just as Donald Trump has said.

On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, we looked at the various ways corporate media is actually more to blame for the disasters in America than the UniParty Swamp.

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