Today's News Slants So Much, the Words Fall off the Page
It's all Left or all Right with no room left right in the middle.
I want to lodge an unbiased report on biased reporting … by the Left and by the Right. It’s all so slanted, it will make your head spin if you’re simply looking for truth.
A few stories caught my attention today because of how misleading their headlines were. Another story was about the bias at Fox News in election coverage where the “reporters,” which they do not deserve to be called because it’s all commentary these days, proudly display their bias. (I’m bringing the headlines up to the top of this edition since the story is largely about the bias in some of the headlines so everyone needs to see the bias.)
Leaning Left against Leavitt
I’m going to start with this one where the bias is brazen:
Leavitt Admits ‘Fixing’ D.C. Crime Stats Amid DOJ Probe
Not only does the headline imply that Trump’s press secretary is rigging the crime stats by using the word “fixing” and putting it in air quotes, apparently, because it’s not what she actually said; but the story, itself, begins with a false characterization by saying she is “admitting” to it, like it was a charge of wrongdoing.
According to DNYUZ,
Donald Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has admitted that the White House “reconfigured” crime statistics to back up the President’s claims of lawlessness in Washington.
“Reconfigured” was the word she used, not “fixing,” but “fixing,” as in “fixing the fight” or “fixing the race” sound more scandalous. Saying she “admitted” to it also makes it sound like a confession.
Now, all you have to do is slightly read between the lines to get at the truth that they have cleverly camouflaged:
Despite the Department of Justice probing D.C. officials for allegedly manipulating crime data, Leavitt told reporters the administration had in fact reconstructed their own statistics in response to “false” media reports about the president’s crackdown.
The true story is that the DoJ believes Washington, D.C., officials are cooking the books. So, Leavitt or others in the Trump Administration made their own crime chart with the numbers reconstructed to show what they believe is true.
“I believe it was the Washington Post who put out a map claiming it to be fact-based when it was just based on, I don’t know, accounts that they’ve heard on the street, not actual statistics and data,” she told reporters at the White House.
They were countering a map published by The Washington Post that the DoJ says was false data.
“So we went and reconfigured the numbers and as I said, half, nearly half of all the non-illegal alien related arrests have occurred in wards seven and eight in the District of Columbia, where we know there’s the highest rate of crime. So we’ll continue to do that.”
Now, if they lied in creating a different map, then they would be cooking the books, so to speak. If they are, in fact, just publishing unvarnished numbers that disagree with D.C.’s and The Washington Post’s claims, they are not “fixing” the statistics in the dishonest sense. The slant given to the story presumes their dishonesty in presenting different numbers. The story could have said the White House was “correcting” the numbers put out by D.C. or presenting what it believes to be the correct numbers. There is room for disagreement.
Deeper in the story, after they’ve set a false tone, implying Leavitt was illegally or underhandedly changing the outcome of the statistics, you do read,
The Department of Justice is also investigating allegations that D.C. officials had manipulated crime data to make the nation’s capital seem safer than it is.
That is the core issue here. Team Trump presented what they believe to be the actual data as a correction to what D.C. officials had published. In fact, it appears deeper into the story that the Left was trying to manipulate the data, but that part is buried:
Alarm bells rang out last month when a Metropolitan Police Department commander was suspended for allegedly making changes to crime statistics in his district.
It sounds like the fix may have already been in. That’s why Leavitt, or someone in the Trump admin, tried to correct the published numbers with their own chart.
I know from experience that most people just read the headlines, so cook the headlines, and you change public perception. I know that because only about 3% of the people who open my emailed publications click on any of the headlines on days when the headlines are open to everyone. When I polled readers about this, they said the headline list had value for them but not because they read the stories, just because they appreciate having a scan of the news. The percentage of those who read the actual stories may be much higher in the original publication of each story, but those headlines get carried in news aggregation sites like my own, where they mostly get scanned. So doctoring the headline can influence a lot of people.
In other words, present your bias up front and bury the truth deeper in the story.
Fun with clickbait
Here’s another contrived headline, but this time it is from a source where you expect it. While I have, once in awhile, presented a story from The Mirror if it seemed like it had credibility or because I saw the story carried in sources that do have credibility but I thought The Mirror had the best photos or broadest coverage, it is, like The National Enquirer, a source of information that may, in my opinion, be just as much a source of mis-information. You know, the stuff like (making up a wild example for fun) “Surrogate Monkey has Alien Baby for the Clintons.”
Today The Mirror showed off a prime example of its willingness to fabricate clickbait headlines:
Trump's afterlife fear sparks fresh health concerns as president admits 'I'm not doing well'
The president’s comment had NOTHING to do with his health, nor was there any actual concern in the public response. His statement that he’s not doing well was completely in respect to his chances of making it to heaven based on how good he is. It was a rare moment of humility that had nothing to do with his health. If you want to see what he actually said and get an understanding of what he was talking about, here’s another story that lays out what he was really saying by getting at what Donald Trump’s religious beliefs actually are, and how they compare to Christianity.
OK, the mirror didn’t totally make up the fact that people were saying he must think he’s dying. They quote, as many publications often do as their source of facts these days, comments on social media (yeah, that’s a meaningful source) where people, probably more in comedy than in fact, were saying things such as, “He must think he’s dying.” Said in a context that hardly evoked concern, more just whimsical conversation or dark humor, such as a big smile with “Hey, maybe he thinks he’s going to die soon.”
The headline, by making it all sound like more than it was, is clickbait because the afterlife concerns the president was really talking about had nothing to do with his health. Frankly, I thought his concerns that he would not make it to heaven at the rate he’s going were more intriguing as well as revelatory of how little he understands about the actual beliefs of his supporters; but I’ll leave it to other article to explain that for anyone who is interested.
Making the news Foxy for your friends
Having described the bias on the Left, I want to move to a story about bias on the political Right—this time not in the form of recasting headlines to give them a slant but in the objectives so-called reporters state they are trying to achieve:
This article reveals how removing redactions in the documents from Smartmatic’s legal case against Fox News for Fox’s defamatory claims against their voting equipment revealed a lot of bias the company was aware of within its own “news” organization. (It should be called “Fox Commentary” because any news is a five-minute springboard for thirty-five minutes of commentary. I still go by the old standard of keeping my news headlines clearly separate from my personal commentary. While they mix it all together in one big mashup, I have an editorial on the news and a news section.)
A slew of private text messages from current and former Fox News hosts were made public on Tuesday night after a judicial hearing officer unredacted parts of a motion filed by Smartmatic….
After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump falsely alleged the contest had been rigged against him. In the ensuing weeks, some Fox News hosts and guests echoed those claims and singled out Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems for having played a role in getting Joe Biden elected. In 2023, Fox settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion for $787.5 million.
So, Fox already effectively lost a famous case brought against it by Dominion that pushed toward a billion-dollar settlement. I think it’s pretty clear no one settles for that extraordinary amount just to save legal fees, so Fox must have known its case was weak and that, the longer it went on, the more it would reveal Fox’s lack of due diligence in trying to ascertain the truth ahead of reporting. It would make Fox look sloppy and negligent as a “news” organization. Smartmatic’s case is now revealing the same cavalier disregard for the facts at Fox:
Smartmatic’s motion was filed in late April, but only now are many of the texts from Fox News employees in it public after being recently unredacted….
Here are the five juiciest revelations from the filing:
Jeanine Pirro bragged about helping Trump and the Republican Party….
“I work so hard for the party across the country,” Pirro told then-Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel in a text message in September 2020. At the time, Pirro hosted Justice with Judge Jeanine. “I’m the Number 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend. I work so hard for the President and party.”
That, of course, got her a cherry position at the White House. This wasn’t a statement made in a public interview. This was her claim, formerly redacted, made in a personal text to the RNC chair, saying that she’s solidly on their side, doing her best through her “news” show to get the president elected. OK, consider her show just commentary (like my commentary); in that case, it’s fine that she has a bias (an opinion or an objective, but it’s not fine if that bias causes her to make false statements just to use her show to disseminate falsehoods for her own guy’s advantage, such as Smartmatic is claiming she did.
Pirro’s producer at the time was Jerry Andrews, who warned the host against making claims of election fraud.
“You should be very careful with this stuff and protect yourself given the ongoing calls for evidence that has not materialized,” Andrews told her.
The Fox news chiefs knew there was no evidence to back her claims, so they warned her to tone it down or to be careful to stick to known facts. She didn’t take the warning well and, instead, exclaimed she was being censored!
“I’M TIRED OF THE CENSORSHIP AND I’M EMBARRASSED BY HOW THEY CALLED THIS ELECTION,” she wrote to her colleague.
But then listen to the following Fox advocate who was in favor of making claims that the producer said had no evidence to support them:
Jesse Watters said that Fox going “all in” on election fraud claims would be a ratings bonanza.
Dominion’s earlier suit revealed texts by Fox’s Tucker Carlson that said the same kind of thing. Carlson candidly claimed in personal emails Trump was the devil but then said Fox needed to present him positively because that is what their listeners craved or they’d lose viewership if they did not take Trump’s side. So, even though Carlson said all kinds of bad things about Trump in private, he wanted to push pro-Trump news stories just because it would greatly improve ratings.
This is called “pandering to your audience,” something I refuse to ever do on The Daily Doom, even though it sometimes costs me a loss in supporters to take that stand. If I cannot write what I believe is the truth, I’d truly rather not write this publication at all. Carlson didn’t care about truth. He cared about getting his ratings up; thus, he became the biggest reason Fox had to pay out a vast fortune to Dominion.
“Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” Jesse Watters texted Fox’s Greg Gutfeld in December 2020 as Trump was ramping up his efforts to overturn the election. In a text the day after the election, Watters expressed concern about audience backlash after Fox was the first network to call Arizona for Biden.
“There’s an audience uprising vs. Fox like I’ve never seen,” he texted a producer.
For some at Fox, it’s all about the ratings. While those at the top tried to quash some claims that couldn’t be backed with actual evidence, they didn’t do that well enough to avoid serious defamation law suits, which typically are not easy to win against a news organization where freedom of the press puts a high onus on the accusers if they are to bring down the press with claims of flagrant dishonesty.
Thus,
A producer at the network told Watters that “you cannot, under any circumstances, cast doubt” on the election because “the powers that be are not having any of it.”
Upper management knew the risk yet did not fully manage to get all of their cats herded into the company corral.
Sometimes some of Fox’s reporters did try to stop the bias that was going on:
Bret Baier told Fox executives that Maria Bartiromo’s election coverage needed fact-checking.
Bret Baier texted Fox News executive Jay Wallace to express dismay at the election coverage provided by Maria Bartiromo.
“None of that is true as far as we can tell,” Baier wrote. “We need to fact-check this crap.”
I’m sure the heads of Fox wish now they would have!
I have personally often (truly, not just joking here) wondered if Bartiromo sleeps with Trump, given the extent to which she cozies up to him in fawning interviews (but that’s just my commentary, not something I am presenting as news).
Zeroing in the peculiar bias at Zero Hedge
You see, as an equal-opportunity critic of both sides, I have laid out stories that show bias against Trump and stories that show bias for Trump. That’s why The Daily Doom exists—to cut through “this crap,” as Baier called it. Now I’m going to report some really odd bias at Zero Hedge today.
I’ve been noticing that, while they are flamboyantly biased in favor of Russia in every story they carry that mentions Russia, they are for some reason consistently biased against China, which is odd since China is Russia’s ally. They often say that China will be the one to bring on WW3 (now that they can no longer keep saying it will be Biden) and that Trump needs to be aggressive with China. Well, that bias showed up in an oddly fabricated way today.
There was a story in the news that said,
Chinese surgeons save patient who was nearly beheaded by robotic arm
It was about a nearly miraculous surgery in which a man, whose spine was completely snapped in two at the neck with the vertebrae shattered into bits and pieces, lived (but barely) because the nerves in the neck and the arteries stretched but didn’t sever. Just surviving seemed like a miracle, but the Chinese doctors actually managed to unplug two vital vertebral arteries that were mostly plugged by bone fragments and quickly recreate an artificial segment of spinal vertebrae and put him all back together again. The man was a factory worker, and he got too close to a robotic arm at the factory that swung and cracked him on the back of the neck.
Zero Hedge retold the story with completely added content that had nothing to do with what happened. If I hadn’t looked back to the original story (above), I wouldn’t have been able to figure out what they were up to. Here was their retelling in order to make China look bad by using one of its miracle surgery stories against it:
Robot Nearly Decapitates Man In Gruesome Surgery Fail
First, the surgery was not a FAIL. It was a smashing success. Well, neither account tells how the man is doing today, but the original story was about a successful surgery, not a fail, and ZH provides no facts of any kind to support their headline’s claim that it was a “surgery fail.”
Second, the editors must not have even read their own version of the story because their headline makes it sound like a surgery robot nearly decapitated a man, but the rest of their story doesn’t say that. What is the purpose in making it sound like a Chinese surgery robot nearly decapitated someone? (Surgery robots are increasingly being used around the world. Mostly they are remotely controlled by a licensed surgeon, not AI, though, according to a recent story, AI can now control surgical robots, making its own decisions.)
The story is clear that the accident happened on a factory floor, but surely ZH could have seen that their headline makes it sound like there was catastrophic failure by a surgery robot. Why would they do that? The surgery was a remarkable success! While the story goes on to talk about the successful surgery, why a headline that calls it a “surgery fail?”
I think the answer can be found in the next and most bizarre part, which is ZH’s added conclusion to the story:
Despite warnings from some in China about the risks of defective combat robots, the government is aggressively advancing AI-driven battlefield systems. Recent tactical exercises featuring "robotic wolves" underscore Beijing's rapid push toward unmanned warfare.
The China’s 76th Group Army's recent drills focused on battlefield coordination between human personnel and autonomous technologies designed for reconnaissance, strategic point clearing, fire support and breaching defensive positions, according to official military statements. These exercises represent China's latest and most aggressive effort to advance unmanned warfare capabilities as part of the growing global arms race in military robotics.
Absolutely NOTHING in the original story was about combat robots. It was not even necessarily an AI-operated robot that injured the man, though ZH suddenly switches to talking about AI to create the sense that this was some rogue AI incident where AI started killing people. The original story doesn’t say, but it was most likely just a pre-programmed factory robot like the kind you see working in Ford plants that has no intelligence, other than the intelligence of the original human programmers who created its prescribed movements.
The man just got in the way, as one can get in the way of any factory machine, and was nearly decapitated. Yet, ZH turns the story into one about Chinese warfare robots operated by AI that risk going rouge to where they may kill the wrong people! What a leap! Talk about a forced ending and highly contrived slant!
The original story had nothing to do with AI and nothing to do with combat robots and certainly was the exact opposite of a “surgery fail.” The only “ai” in the whole story that isn’t in the middle of a word is at the end of the word “Shanghai.” I think ZH shanghaied the story to its own objective, which always seems to be to present China as a major war threat to the US, while presenting Putin as a benevolent, humanitarian, democratic leader. They sometimes seem to be warmongering for a conflict with China.
Watch out for people who just make stuff up. There is enough doom in the world without the need to make stuff up. I ought to know. I find plenty of it every day for this publication. In fact, I have to constantly try to weed out the fake stuff, which isn’t easy now that even AI is sometimes making stuff up and now that a high percentage of articles are being written by AI or with the help of AI without letting the reader know. Even search results are getting made up by AI.
I never need to make stuff up for The Daily Doom. The world has enough everyday doom to boggle the mind. The challenge is only in filtering out the fake stuff.
Making sure I’m not slanted
(I know: “I’m” is slanted because I put it in italics.) Now, here’s a note I tacked into a headline today, but I’ll call it out for you here because the intent wasn’t to slyly slant the story but to spell out the reason I’m presenting it (so, I’m making that clear here):
Fascist Economics: Lutnick says Intel has to give government equity in return for CHIPS Act funds
“Fascist Economics” is not in the original headline, but I wanted to note that what is happening here is, in economic circles, called “fascist economics.” It is the kind of economics deployed by Hitler and Musolini where the government invested huge amounts of public money in building commercial/private factories in a public partnership to boost the economy and to drive war production. The government became part owner in the companies.
The aim here is similar, and it began as part of Bidenomics. For security reasons, the government wants chips that are vital to US military machinery to be made in the US. That makes sense because we don’t want them to other nations to have secret backdoors in their chips that function as kill switches that can just crash our planes out of the sky all at once in the middle of combat or to reset our nuclear missiles to return home shortly after launch. So, the government is granting huge sums of money to companies like Intel to create production facilities here.
Still, it is the same thing done by fascists, and it does come with the significant economic danger that, increasingly, the government is directing commerce. It moves us more in the direction of central planning. The problem with all of this is that government gets in the business of picking winners and losers driving huge chunks of its “taxpayer” money to certain businesses. It reads of good-ol’-boy politics. (Have to put “taxpayer” in quotes in this context since taxpayers will never be directly paying off the debt that now funds most of what the government does. Let’s just hope the debt, when it crashes, crashes on the right players, which is hoping for a lot. Most likely, we’ll all pay indirectly, not through taxes but through hugely devalued bank accounts and other dollar-denominated assets/retirement funds or fixed incomes that don’t keep up with inflation.)
What the government could do, instead of taking out a stake in the company, would be to offer prepayment (in the same amount of money as these grants) on contracts for weapon-parts production, rather than up-front grants to build factories in exchange for partial ownership in the company. The contracts with money fronted to help build the factories necessary to fulfill the contracts, would have to be repaid if the promised production from said factories does not happen on schedule due to the factory owner’s fault. That gives a company reason to build the factory in the US. They have a guaranteed contract IF they do. You might not even need to front the money (as grants do). It would be better not to.
There may be other methods, but that was what came first to mind over using public funds to own stakes in corporations. It’s a slippery slope. We treaded lightly down it with some past bailouts as a way to make sure to get the taxpayers dollars back, but we would do well to find other ways.