If You’ve Ever Wondered Why I Never Got a Job in What Some Call “Actual Media”

Posted: November 6, 2019 by datechguy in dablog, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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…It’s likely because I was willing to write about Jeffrey Epstein while stuff like this was going on.

Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years. Robach vents her anger in a “hot mic” moment with an off-camera producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it’s early stages.  “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre) [alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein.  No one knows who that is.  This is a stupid story.”
She continues, “The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”
Robach goes on to express she believes that Epstein was killed in prison saying, “So do I think he was killed? 100% Yes, I do…He made his whole living blackmailing people… Yup, there were a lot of men in those planes. A lot of men who visited that Island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment.”
Robach repeats a prophetic statement purportedly made by Attorney Brad Edwards “…[T]here will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” and Disgustedly Robach states “I had it all three years ago.”

That’s via James O’Keefe and Project Veritas who had hot mic info that was so explosive that he actually activated a “dead man’s switch” to make sure that this came out in the event of his death.

It was so big that for once the MSM didn’t ignore what he was saying. ABC responded thus:

ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast.
“We would never run away from that,” Chris Vlasto, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015, when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre

For the sake of the few who might actually buy that argument let me remind you of something I wrote in 2014.

If there is one thing the media that loves to play the War on Women® card doesn’t want to touch it’s a story about people using their own private island to get laid that involves Bill Clinton.
What could the media do if this story involving the former father of the year? They would call it old news, not relevant, dirty tricks from a salacious lawsuit that doesn’t even involve him and an attack on Hillary that crosses the line. In fact the left will deploy a plethora of adjectives to discourage further discussion of this story from antiquated to zany, but there is one adjective that could not come out of their mouth to dismiss this story:
Unbelievable
The last few years have proven that the left can convince a low information voter of a lot of things, but even the full power of the mainstream media and the strongest zealots from the War on Women® brigade would not be able to convince the American public that Bill Clinton would have no interest or business on a private island where orgies took place.
That’s why you didn’t see this story in the news last month and why as the case moves forward you’ll not see it covered period.

And a piece I wrote during the 2016 campaign:

as I was watching Jake Tapper on Monday discussing this and the security implication of blackmail for the husband of a top aide of Hillary Clinton my head started spinning.
We are seriously talking about the security implication of Anthony Weiner due to his sexual peccadilloes when we are talking about letting Bill freaking Clinton back into the White House?
I know the MSM is still trying to pretend that this is no big deal but I have two words to say to such people:
Jeffrey Epstein

Along with some video from MSNBC at the time with this key exchange

Video that MSNBC suppressed once the Free Beacon linked to it

Maybe it’s just me but given how often we see stuff at mediaite et al it seems rather unusual for a news network to make a copyright claim over a clip from a news story that used as “fair use” by another news organization. Could this suggest that NBC wants to keep this clip out of the public view because it might hurt Hillary?


I can see the NBC reaction now: Nonsense, we’re not censoring the clip at all. The seven minute clip IS available IF you

  1. Go to the Morning Joe site
  2. Hit search taking you to the MSNBC search engine
  3. Search for Donald Trump
  4. Narrow the field to Morning Joe
  5. Narrow the field to May 16th 2016 and sit through all the videos till you find the right one.
  6. And skip ahead to the 12 minute mark on that video.

If you do so you CAN find the clip

Incidentally the clip does not work from the MSNBC site anymore as but the Free Beason has since found another Youtube account with it that is no longer suppressed as the election is long over and the Epstein Story is now public knowledge.

Apparently they aren’t so worried about their copyright after all.

So when ABC tells you they didn’t have the story, look at the faces around that Morning Joe table who all knew what was being said and then try to make that case.

I suspect writing about this type of thing when everyone wanted it suppressed might have something to do with me not making it bigger in the business but then again if I was bigger and writing about it perhaps it might have lead to a sudden heart attack.

Baseball and Game-Playing

Posted: November 5, 2019 by julietteochieng in media, News/opinion, Sports, Uncategorized
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Boston Red Sox 2018 World Series Championship ring that I’m sure Peter likes seeing again.

by baldilocks

Yesterday, a goodly portion of the Washington Nationals visited the White House in celebration of their victory in the 2019 World Series and at least two of the players were pummeled on Twitter for openly being fans of President Trump. I’m sure the two players will console themselves with that beautiful ring they get to wear.

In contrast, there were several players who skipped the White House visit. I didn’t notice much talk about them. But, of course it was their choice to make.

It’s a safe bet, however, that the latter received a digital pat on the back from the usual suspects. We know that it’s a safe bet because we have some comparative information. 

[R]etired Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady turned down Obama’s invitation to come to the White House and were met with strong criticism from media.

Thomas’s decision not to visit the White House in 2012 was widely criticized. U.S. News & World Report writer Susan Milligan headlined a story on the incident that said his decision was not brave, “it was just rude.” ESPN writer Joe McDonald wrote that Thomas chose to put himself above the team through his decision not to attend.

“When the president of the United States invites you and all your teammates to the White House to honor your Stanley Cup championship, you go and represent the team,” McDonald wrote.

Emphasis mine.

Hahahahahahaha!

Of course, we know that this only applies when the president is a Democrat and it double applied in the lone case in which the president was of African descent.

And then there is a whole other category of rules for Orange Man Bad.

If I were a team owner, I’d make it mandatory (in the contract) for all players and coaches to attend a White House gathering in the wake of a championship victory – unless there’s a life or death emergency — regardless of who the president is. That or get fined/traded.

But I guess that’s why I’m just a broke blogger.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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Forty years later: the media and the Iran hostage crisis

Posted: November 5, 2019 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

Forty years ago this week, I traveled to Iran to cover the takeover of the U.S. embassy, an event that embarrassed the United States and the administration of Jimmy Carter.

What isn’t debated on this anniversary is how badly I and the rest of the news media reported what happened.

First, the hostage-takers weren’t “students,” the moniker that still sticks today. A.J. Caschetta, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, provides some interesting background.

For example, author Tim Wells interviewed most of the hostages for his oral history, 444 Days: The Hostages Remember (1985). Few called their captors “students,” using various terms: Iranians, radicals, militants, terrorists, goons, guards, knuckleheads, turkeys, and assholes.

One of the key leaders of the hostage-takers was Hossein Sheikholeslam, who convened press conferences for the legions of international journalists that flocked to Tehran. But he hadn’t been a student since the early 1970s when he attended the University of California at Berkeley. His proficiency in English also made him suitable to interrogate the hostages. Sheikholeslam “may have been trained in interrogation techniques,” wrote William Daugherty, one of only four CIA officers stationed at the embassy on November 4.

Another ringleader, Mohammad Hashemi, wasn’t a student. He spent his time with friends forming a group called “Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line,” which gave orders to those who showed up to protest outside the U.S. embassy. They wore laminated photos of Khomeini around their necks and pinned to their jackets.

The hostage-takers “strictly allied with Khomeini and the new mullah establishment,” according to Mark Bowden in Guests of the Ayatollah (2006). As Bowden puts it, they “were all committed to a formal Islamic state and were allied, some of them by family, with the clerical power structure around Khomeini.”

Second, the news media didn’t understand how big the story would become. The foreign editor of Newsweek, where I worked, told me the takeover wouldn’t last more than a day or so. It went on for 444 days!

Newsweek didn’t put the story on the cover until three weeks after the takeover occurred and then only as a part of an overall analysis of the burning of the U.S. embassy in Libya, the Russian influence in the Afghanistan government, and Islamists taking over Mecca.

The U.S. television networks were so unprepared that only one ABC News radio reporter had a valid visa to get into Iran. As a result, ABC had exclusive coverage for several days, laying the groundwork for “America Held Hostage” and then Nightline.

Third, many journalists thought the religious government of Iran had to be better than the Shah. How wrong we were!

I will now say an act of contrition. I hope other reporters do the same. 

Net Rules, Hill Photo Blues, Beto bye Bye, Kamala Conventional Wisdom & McDonald’s Unconventional One, Under the Fedora

Posted: November 5, 2019 by datechguy in business, elections, oddities, politics, primaries, under the fedora
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There is only one thing that amazes me about the Katie Hill story. It’s the idea that she really believed that she could have nudes on the net and that nobody would notice.

Now I grant you, if she just thought nobody would care, she might have gotten away with it, but the concept that it would stay quiet is just silly.

Never forget that the internet is forever and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.

It’s been really funny watching the media try to spin Rep Hill’s resignation as a GOP hit job as if the party made her pose for those pictures and put them on the net. They forget that while folks in the bubble still might buy it, the actual story and the pictures are only a click away and that the sole narrative is no longer theirs.

I would have thought Matt Drudge would have taught them that decades ago but they’ve never gotten over it.

There are a lot of people who are laughing about Beto departure from the Presidential race, I’m not.

First of all Beto was extremely useful in that he said aloud the thing we all know and the left didn’t want said. With him out the left/media will do their best to pretend that others do not think like he does and such questions will not be in the debate. With him in the race that wasn’t possible.

But most important of all in the end every single democrat running for the nomination is going to lose except for one, so until it’s down to 3 or 4 candidate, the individual failures don’t mean a thing. So I don’t get excited about it, with one exception…

…that exception is Kamila Harris. Watching her fail has been an absolute pleasure, not just because she is a huge phony who slept her way to the top, but because she is the perfect illustration of the truth about conventional wisdom.

For a very long time everyone who “mattered” told us that Kamila Harris was the future and a lock for the nomination. the day she was elected it was considered Presidential prep. Her folding like a cheap suit demonstrates that conventional wisdom is always correct…right up until the moment that it’s not.

Finally speaking of the conventional wisdom, I began this piece at a McDonalds speaking with some elderly gentlemen when the manager going home came by to say hi. I struck up a conversation with him and discoveered two things I didn’t know.

  1. A slice of cheese costs them .32 when you factor in all the assorted costs.
  2. The Kiosks have led to him INCREASING rather than decreasing his staff.

That 1st fact wasn’t a big surprise but the 2nd really threw me off, I asked the manager why?

He said 1st of all we needed someone to service the tables because the Kisoks require delivery to the table and second of all the Kiosks, along with the various delivery services, increased business and orders to the point where they needed those extra folks for the cooking etc.

Now I don’t know if this is peculiar to the local McDonalds or not but I think it would be worth finding out, but assuming the manager is not blowing smoke I’d say it’s worth finding out on a larger scale.

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