Corrupt Journalism Quotes

If it’s true that nothing is more potent than an idea, then those who control the media can direct minds en masse.

As always, imagine how great the press corps would be if it devoted 1/1000th the energy to dissecting non-sex political wrongdoing

Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.

People nowadays talk about the world's problems like they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they're told and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

More powerful than armies and police, stronger than guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways

A funny word. E-lec-tion. Say it very slowly and it sounds disgusting. But if you say it just fast enough it almost sounds real, like it might even be legitimate

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

Traditional journalism, where reporters deliver information in a balanced and unbiased fashion, is rapidly fading into obscurity. This is especially evident on television where high profile reporters become bigger than the story, delivering news with large dollops of personality and wit – almost as if they are actors.

The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

The government researchers,aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing acts desired for national security and defense.” p. 53 – 54

They’re afraid. It’s the same as it always has been. A corrupt leader needs to control what the people think so they don’t revolt. There are three ways to do that: don’t allow them to learn anything that counters the official line, bombard them with propaganda disguised as news, and finally, give them a distraction, usually an enemy.

I wish I hadn't met you in the rain: it comes every winter. I wish you hadn't told me your favorite wine: I've become a drinker. I wish I never showed you my hidden birthmark: It looks back at me at night asking where you are. I wish I hadn't read you my journal, all the pages praising you, It's corrupted now that I can't tell if I write for me or you. I wish I hadn't told you my daily routine: it's not mine anymore. I can't enjoy 11:11, my favorite song, a birthday cake, or a concert tour. I'm not afraid of the future, it's the past that takes a while.

Ravens and crows. Rats Mists and clouds. Insects and corruption. Strange events and odd occurrences. The ordinary twisted and strange. Wonders! The dead are beginning to walk and some see them. Others do not, but more and more, we all fear the night. These have been our days. They rain upon us beneath a dead sky, crushing us with their fury, until as one we beg: "Let it begin!" -Journal of the Unknown Scholar, entry for The Feast of Freia, 1000 NE

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day's edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the 'Dear Leader'—Little Boy's exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the 'hardship period' through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.

Not that bad? This ain't fucking MIT, this is ninth grade! Look at this shit!' he said, holding the progress report up. 'You got a fucking C in ninth grade journalism? How does that even happen? You work for the New York fucking Times? Couldn't break that big corruption story? Jesus Christ. Unbelievable.

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:

Corrupt people fear books because they contain something more powerful than themselves: ideas.

Informer'... means one who gives information. It means what 'journalist' ought to mean. The only difference is that the Common Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be ruined if he does.

How could there ever be a real moral reason for war?' Harper would ask rhetorically. 'It always comes down to someone’s greed. History is populated by the distorted tyrants and corrupt businessmen willing to trade a cup full of blood for a purse filled with gold.

I saw in these southern provinces so many vices and corruptions, increased by this trade and this way of life, that it appeared to me as a dark gloominess hanging over the land; and though now many willingly run into it, yet in future the consequence will be grievous to posterity.

It is very bad in America to be right too early. It is considered a sin in journalism to tell the public what you have learned in real time, both because you are going against the tide of profit motive, but mostly because it destroys plausible deniability for the corrupt and powerful.

What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within. -This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus....begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play.

It reminds me that in spite of our lofty ideals and the many safeguards to protect the Scythedom from corruption and depravity, we must always be vigilant, because power comes infected with the only disease left to us: the virus called human nature. I fear for us all if scythes begin to love what they do. —From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie

My friends, one last word: I will be scrutinizing the election like a hawk. If I weren't, if the newspapers weren't being vigilant against the corrupt men of the world, we would be lost. Ours wouldn't be a democracy. And let us only hope for the peace of our beloved village that propriety in this election, and all future elections, will be observed.

The big question, I jotted down during the long wait at the long wait at the airport, is how to hope and what to hope for. We are citizens of corrupt country, of a corrupt vision. There is such a sense of death and of being buried under the weight of technocracy. How to keep cool and get hold of the essential... and, above all, how to recognize the essential.

I'll be glad to be rid of you. When a man sinks to reading fashion journals - no, it's worse than that. When a man finds himself plumbing their depths, seeking arcane knowledge of no use to him whatsoever ... Oh, it's your corrupting influence. I shall be glad to see the back of you, Noirot, and return to my life.' 'It annoys you to be a guardian angel,' she said.

Journalists are not entertainers. We are reporters. We go to places that are unpopular. We broadcast voices that are controversial. We are not here to win popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure the media, to shame the media into going into these forgotten places where so many are sent to waste away in silence.

More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences. This is a major structural flaw of the new fully divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals. Now I mean, people are trying to do something, but I think it’s not publish or perish, it’s publish in the okay places [or perish]. And this has assembled a most ridiculous group of people. I wrote a column for many years in the nineties, in a journal called Current Biology. In one article, “Hard Cases”, I campaigned against this [culture] because I think it is not only bad, it’s corrupt. In other words it puts the judgment in the hands of people who really have no reason to exercise judgment at all. And that’s all been done in the aid of commerce, because they are now giant organisations making money out of it.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

But it is troubling how many people expect applause, recognition, when they have not even begun to learn an art or a craft. Instant success is the order of the day; “I want it now!” I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines. Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn’t start at the first try. So the few things that we still do, such as cooking (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.

[...] The problems I’ve discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, Jan 15 2009)

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War Office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers

Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other. I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit.

All this does not, however, prevent the people who move in it from imagining, whenever society is stationary for the moment, that no further change will occur, just as in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone they decline to believe in the aeroplane. Meanwhile the philosophers of journalism are at work, castigating the preceding epoch, and not only the kind of pleasures in which it indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the successive moods of fashionable frivolity. The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been "great changes.

But, if I was never complete, I never exaggerated. Every one of those articles was an understatement, especially where the conditions were bad, and the proof thereof is that while each article seemed to astonish other cities, it disappointed the city which was its subject.... I cut twenty thousand words out of the Philadelphia article and yet I had not written half my facts. I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book. This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.

When a liberal professor takes enormous intellectual liberties by openly promoting an ideological agenda to his students, the cry of academic freedom rings across the quads. But when a conservative professor is punished for publishing an article in a politically incorrect journal, there is no defense of intellectual diversity. What is billed as academic neutrality turns out to be a smoke screen for the relativistic liberal agenda. Today's relativists could not have gotten away with their double standards in a culture that prized truth. But a gradual, sustained assault on truth has been carried out through the soft underbelly of Western culture: the arts. In film, music, and television, the themes of sensual pleasure and individual choice have drowned out the tried-and-true virtues of faith, family, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, patriotism, and fidelity in marriage. Cultural mechanics have wielded their tools to dull the public's sense of reasonable limits. In an Age of Consent, the silly and the profound are becoming indistinguishable.

Of all the things I could have ended up doing, in pursuit of the most honest, I ended up in the most corrupt business around in the United States: writing. The most corrupt because in this country the least is at stake. I feel like I know a little of what it must have felt like to be a writer in the Stalinist thirties, during the purges, during the heyday of socialist realism. I’m living the past as the future, when I thought I was going to find my way to the actual future. But given this pervasive corruption, what can you do? I’ve stressed one point again and again, which is, community based on equality, not insecurity and desperate yearning to be recognized. The way to real community might ironically be to give in to behaviors which seem to be its antithesis. One always has the choice to end the waste of time implicated in mutual flattery, which halts the progress of one’s art, and instead congregate around an aesthetic vision among equals, by creating a press, or starting a journal or reading series, or simply getting together to talk about writing.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we’d enter a world where readers couldn’t tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.

The whole business of medical journals is corrupt because owners are making money from restricting access to important research, most of it funded by public money.

But something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980s. Part of it was the 'public diplomacy' pressures from the outside. But part of it was the smug, snotty, sophomoric crowd that came to dominate the national media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the 1990s, the media had become the monster.

A 2002 Wall Street Journal article provided eye-opening details about how comprehensive review worked in practice. UCLA had accepted a Hispanic girl with SATs of 940, while rejecting a Korean student with 1500s. The Korean student hardly lived in the lap of luxury. He tutored children to pay rent for his divorced mother, who developed breast cancer.

It is clearly evident that unethical and corrupt practices were the bedrock of Prannoy Roy journalism. After getting the Doordarshan contract through patronage and a quid pro quo, he shrewdly cashed out over Rs.23 crores (to his personal account in 1994-95) in a short span of few years (see Table 1 below) by selling shares at astronomical valuations to a foreign investor. Simply put, through political patronage he built a business and cashed out for personal profit.  Table 1. Source: NDTV public issue prospectus filed with SEBI in 2004. Date of transfer No. of Equity Shares (Face value of Rs.10) Cost per Shares (Rs.) Price (Rs.) Nature of payment No. of Equity Shares (of Face Value of Rs.4) post splitting 21 Oct 1994 48,140 10 675 Cash 120,350 16 May 1995 99,070 10 675 Cash 247,675 Jul 21 1995 121,625 10 675 Cash 304,063 Aug 22 1995 81,481 10 675 Cash 203,702 After inking favorable deals with Doordarshan, many people in Central Government in 1997 helped NDTV to clinch a magical figure deal with Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV[3] during the liberalization period. The Lutyens Delhi’s cozy club arm twisted Murdoch into an agreement with Prannoy Roy’s NDTV to launch the Star News channel.

Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage. Also present was everything we admire and require: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

History is populated by the distorted tyrants and corrupt businessmen willing to trade a cup full of blood for a purse filled with gold.

They’re afraid. It’s the same as it always has been. A corrupt leader needs to control what the people think so they don’t revolt. There are three ways to do that: don’t allow them to learn anything that counters the official line, bombard them with propaganda disguised as news, and finally, give them a distraction, usually an enemy.” “Why

Booker Lipton, a black man, back when race still mattered in the world, had made many enemies, but he owed that more to his ruthlessness as a businessman and a clear distrust for the government. He often said he knew corruption had existed everywhere because he’d bribed half the officials in the world. But the elder Lipton was also a paradox, whose deep spiritual beliefs drove him much more than a greedy pursuit of wealth. Booker had funded a group called the Inner Movement that, prior to the Banoff, sought to change the world from a materialistic, personality-based society to one rooted in love and lived from the soul. Then

Their culture is narrowly interbred, and some personal relations border on the incestuous, so they float each other's boat and write almost identical muck-raking stories. Everyone in China knows why they are, and their China-bashing is green-lighting all of us to join the onslaught.

Our Western press soldiers from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, etc. (often 1 correspondent for every 200 million Chinese), happily manufacture stories, demonize the Chinese government, and fabricate heroes, saviors, and incidents for China, at will.

More powerful than armies and police, stronger than guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways.

More powerful than armies and police, stronger than guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways.’ Nelson, the AOI doesn’t think you’re a terrorist.

Walter Lippmann, the father of modern journalism, put it more eloquently: “All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts.

This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, when he visited CNN’s Crossfire: There should be a distinction between news and entertainment. It really matters. The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

More powerful than armies and police, stronger than guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways.’ Nelson, the AOI doesn’t think you’re a terrorist. They monitor people like you because you’re something far more dangerous than a terrorist. You’re a writer with the power to influence people.” “A

how lamentable is the present Corruption of the World! how impure are the Channels through which Trade hath a Conveyance!

The capacity of their Pharma overlords to strong-arm the world’s top two medical journals, the NEJM and The Lancet, into condoning deadly research95,96 and to simultaneously publish blatantly fraudulent articles in the middle of a pandemic, attests to the cartel’s breathtaking power and ruthlessness. It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma.

If conscienceless, liars, corrupt, wrong, and stupid enter politics and journalism, the state stays in chaos, and people face oppression.

met Glenn several times back when I was running the Hermitage Fund, trying to expose corruption at some of the companies we invested in. He was tall, unkempt, and vaguely bearlike. In 2011, he had given up journalism to set up an investigation firm in Washington called Fusion GPS. “I thought Glenn was one of the good guys,” I said. “Perhaps he was, but now he does opposition research for anyone willing to pay,” the journalist said, referring to the types of investigations done by firms that dig up dirt on political candidates

étaler /etale/ I. vtr 1. (déployer) to spread out [carte, document, drap]; to lay [nappe, moquette]; to spread [tapis]; (Culin) to roll [sth] out [pâte]; (Jeux) to lay down [cartes] 2. (éparpiller) to scatter [papiers, affaires, livres] 3. (répandre) to spread [beurre, pâté, colle]; to apply [peinture, maquillage, pommade] 4. (échelonner) to spread [travaux, réformes, remboursements] (sur "over"); to stagger [départs, horaires, vacances] (sur "over") 5. (exhiber) to flaunt [richesse, pouvoir, succès]; to show off [savoir, charmes]; to parade [misère] • ~ au grand jour | to bring [sth] out into the open [divergences, vie privée] 6. (montrer) to display [articles, marchandise] 7. ○(faire tomber) to lay [sb] out (familier) [personne] II. vpr 1. (se répandre) [beurre, peinture] to spread • peinture qui s'étale difficilement | paint which does not spread very well 2. (s'échelonner) [programme, paiement, embouteillage] to be spread (sur "over"); [horaires, départs] to be staggered (sur "over") 3. (s'exhiber) [richesse] to be flaunted • s'~ (au grand jour) | [corruption, lâcheté] to be plain for all to see • une photo/un titre qui s'étale en première page d'un journal | a photo/a headline that is splashed all over the front page of a newspaper • une affiche qui s'étale sur tous les murs de la ville | a poster that is splashed all over the walls in town 4. (s'étendre) [paysage] to spread out; [ville] to spread out, to sprawl • s'~ jusqu'à la mer | to spread out as far as the sea 5. (se vautrer) [personne] to sprawl; (prendre de la place) [personne] to spread out • s'~ sur le divan | to sprawl on the couch 6. ○(tomber) to go sprawling (familier) • s'~ de tout son long | to fall flat on one's face 7. ○(échouer) to fail • s'~ or se faire ~ à un examen | to fail ou flunk (familier) an exam

The headline of a comprehensive exposé in The Guardian expressed the global shock among the scientific community at the rank corruption by scientific publishing’s most formidable pillars: “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”94 The Guardian writers openly accused The Lancet of promoting fraud: “The sheer number and magnitude of the things that went wrong or missing are too enormous to attribute to mere incompetence.” The Guardian commented, “What’s incredible is that the editors of these esteemed journals still have a job—that is how utterly incredible the supposed data underlying the studies was.” The capacity of their Pharma overlords to strong-arm the world’s top two medical journals, the NEJM and The Lancet, into condoning deadly research95,96 and to simultaneously publish blatantly fraudulent articles in the middle of a pandemic, attests to the cartel’s breathtaking power and ruthlessness. It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, confirms, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”97 Dr. Marcia Angell, who served as an NEJM editor for 20 years, says journals are “primarily a marketing machine.”98 Pharma, she says, has co-opted “every institution that might stand in its way.”99,100 Cracking Down on HCQ to Keep Case Fatalities High Referring to the Lancet Surgisphere study during a May 27 CNN interview, Dr. Fauci stated on CNN about hydroxychloroquine,

Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist. In the early twentieth century these fears had attached to the League of Nations, and during the Cold War these fears were often channeled into a virulent anticommunism—though Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) had warned of a European Community that would usher in the reign of the devil. With the fall of the Soviet Union, suspicions fell squarely on the UN. And, in the case of Robertson, on the Illuminati, on wealthy Jewish bankers, and on conspiratorial corporate internationalists. The Wall Street Journal dismissed Robertson’s book as “a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits,” written in an “energetically crackpot style.

journals, admittedly all now controlled by Big Pharma, have refused to publish her papers. The NIH medical libraries have locked her out.

Gabriela Bokassa, agent du DIE*, épouse roumaine d’un chef d’État africain, confirma Ceaușescu dans l’idée qu’un agent d’influence habile, bien employé, pouvait pénétrer une société donnée jusqu’à son niveau le plus élevé. Grâce à elle, Bokassa accorda à la Roumanie des concessions pour des mines de diamants, sur lesquelles il ne prélevait que 10% des bénéfices, versables sur un compte bancaire suisse. Pendant deux ans, Gabriela joua son rôle à la perfection, puis elle fut si effrayée par les excès de Bokassa qu’elle s’enfuit à Paris, la valise bourrée de bijoux qu’elle avait emportée lui assurant en France une vie aisée, tranquille–et anonyme. Lorsque la nouvelle de sa fuite commença à être connue, Ceaușescu qui craignait que des journalistes français se mettent à sa recherche fit répandre par le DIE la rumeur qu’elle avait été renvoyée à Bucarest par l’empereur lui-même. L’opération de désinformation réussit pleinement puisqu’un journal français, «Le Canard enchaîné», ainsi qu’un livre paru en 1977 («Bokassa Ier», Pierre Péan, éditions Alain Moreau) confirmèrent son retour de l’autre côté du rideau de fer, mettant définitivement Gabriela à l’abri des curieux et surtout préservant le secret de son appartenance au DIE. (p. 58) * DIE = Departamentul de Informații Externe, service central d’espionnage roumain

Then, as now, the media establishment resisted change. Despite his successes—most notably his game-changing 1906 exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle—muckraker Sinclair felt himself, “An animal in a cage,” one whose “bars were newspapers.”78 He told the story of his struggles in his 1919 exposé, The Brass Check, not of the packing plants, but of his era’s corrupt journalistic establishment.

Martoglio was also a journalist and newspaper editor. At the age of 16, he actually founded his own newspaper, naming it D’Artagnan, after the famous character from The Three Musketeers of A. Dumas and published it for fifteen years, from 1889 to 1904.4 He achieved fame for his humorous sonnets and for the biting satire with which he attacked the pomposity and corruption of his fellow Catanesi. While his biting criticism endeared him to the people of Catania, for whom Martoglio had a special affection, it caused him a number of problems with others. He was forced to fight duels with twenty-one men whose psyches he had bruised, risking injury and death. The D’Artagnan was written entirely or nearly by Martoglio under various pseudonyms. Of the many characters that he created, his Don Procopio Ballaccheri stands out. Ballaccheri, known as the “Ciciruni di Catania” (The Cicero of Catania) appeared as the main character of La Divina Commedia di Don Procopio Ballaccheri, which Martoglio serialized in his D’Artagnan.5 This wonderful satirical work written in Sicilian was recently published as a book by Salvatore Calleri.6 Ballaccheri was to be the model for Oronzo E. Marginati, which satirist Luigi Locatelli created for Il Travaso delle Idee, the most famous satiric journal in Italy.

History has taught us that those who acquire power corruptly, often don't want their power subverted by dissenting truth-tellers. Censorship is often the harbinger of truth. In the allegorical story of Genesis, Adam and Eve are prohibited from eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Amongst other things, one of the lessons that this story teaches us is that truth is often hidden by prohibition. If one wants to know the truth, one must discern which prohibitions ought to be violated so that the truth can be revealed.

What kind of person burns books? What are they afraid of?” “You’re a librarian. You should know that answer better than most,” Deuce said. “They want certain things forgotten or hidden or never known, and the places where such things are recorded, like books, become dangerous to the corrupt. The ones who want to control what people think. The ones who feel safe only when everyone sees it all their way.

ROOSEVELT READ THE Depew/Platt profile in The Cosmopolitan and began to wonder if the literature of exposure was not becoming a destructive force. He approved of public attacks on corruption and fraud, but not this kind of “hysteria and sensationalism.” The double tendency of subjective journalism, he felt, was toward “suppression of truth” and “assertion or implication of the false.

We Democrats once took pride in ourselves as the party that understood how to read science critically. We confronted—and mercilessly deconstructed—the fatally flawed faux-science contrived by the carbon industry’s PhD biostitutes to support climate change denialism. We also exercised healthy skepticism toward the corrupt drug companies that brought us the opioid crisis and that have paid $86 billion in criminal and civil penalties for a wide assortment of frauds and other crimes since 2000.1 We were disgusted by the phenomenon of “agency capture” and felt a deep revulsion for Pharma’s pervasive control of Congress, the media, and the scientific journals. How is it, then, that today’s Democrats become angry at the mere suggestion that the prevailing COVID drug and vaccine narrative may be heavily manipulated through orchestrated propaganda by a Pharma cartel with billions at stake in promoting COVID countermeasures?

guns and bombs, words are what change the world, and that is why they’re always a threat to those that rule with corrupt ways.

been. A corrupt leader needs to control what the people think so they don’t revolt. There are three ways to do that: don’t allow them to learn anything that counters the official line, bombard them with propaganda disguised as news, and finally, give them a distraction, usually an enemy.

It is not easy to discern whether contemporary journalism is a cynical way to get rich by corrupting man or a “cultural” apostolate carried out by hopelessly uncivilized minds.

The Wall Street Journal’s pop music critic, Jim Fusilli, for example, groused that females were underrepresented among Grammy award nominees. “There is no Grammy category comprised entirely of women,” he complained. “No groups led by women are among the nominees in the Best Contemporary Instrumental, Best Jazz Instrumental, Best Large Jazz Ensemble and Best Contemporary Christian Music album categories.”5 How many female-headed groups exist in those categories and how good are they? That question is sexist.

Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in Florida says corruption will be the new growth industry without the papers watching.

British psychiatrist Duncan Double is a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network, a group of psychiatrists who have major concerns about current psychiatric practice. In a 2018 article Duncan Double wrote that the first official recognition in the medical literature that SSRI antidepressants can cause discontinuation problems was in a British Medical Journal editorial in 1998, more than ten years after the launch of the first SSRI, Prozac.[62] Double points out that the many members of the general public suspected six years earlier that antidepressants were addictive; ‘The Defeat Depression campaign was a five-year national programme launched in January 1992 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in association with the Royal College of General Practitioners. A door-to-door survey of public opinion was undertaken to obtain baseline data before the campaign started and most of the people questioned in the sample, that is 78%, thought that antidepressants were addictive. This finding caused some consternation amongst those running the campaign, because, as far as they were concerned, the public was misinformed on this issue’.

The corrupting aspect of attack journalism is that it is almost always based on anonymous sourcing.

The FDA allows big Pharma to falsify the studies required to patent drugs. These corporations hire armies of ghostwriters to stuff websites and medical journal articles with marketing lies. Finding the truth is now nearly impossible. But all this gets overlooked as the companies pay billions of dollars in criminal settlements nearly every year.

Modern current affairs journalism is a diabolical slurry of political corruption and the flimsy whims of narcissistic millennials. [Dr. Oliver Digbert]

Corrupt people fear books because they contain something more powerful than themselves: ideas. What were they afraid of? What did they think lay hidden in these volumes that warranted such destruction?

Do we feel an affectionate Regard to Posterity; and are we employed to promote their Happiness? Do our Minds, in Things outward, look beyond our own Dissolution; and are we contriving for the Prosperity of our Children after us? Let us then, like wise Builders, lay the Foundation deep; and, by our constant uniform Regard to an inward Piety and Virtue, let them see that we really value it: Let us labour, in the Fear of the Lord, that their innocent Minds, while young and tender, may be preserved from Corruptions; that, as they advance in Age, they may rightly understand their true Interest, may consider the Uncertainty of temporal Things, and, above all, have their Hope and Confidence firmly settled in the Blessing of that Almighty Being, who inhabits Eternity, and preserves and supports the World.

sent evidence of all this to the Wall Street Journal over a dozen times. I sent it to their executive editors, their news editors and their most well-known reporters. They all refused to report on this alleged criminal organization. A financial newspaper that will not report the theft of trillions of dollars by Wall Street firms! I sent this information to the New York Times at least a dozen times. I contacted their news editors and public editors. I sent this information to the Bond Buyer, the largest municipal bond publication I am aware of. I also called them and emailed them. They did touch superficially on this in some articles but never told the whole story.

Speech itself, inevitable and unrelenting, is the wind. It can dance like a zephyr. It can roar shriek or wail. But it can't be stopped. Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage. Also present was everything we admire -- and require -- from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power. Same as it ever was.

Dial.833.742.9500 How to fix QuickBooks Desktop payroll not working after latest updates? QuickBooks Desktop payroll is a vital tool for businesses, enabling accurate and timely employee payments and tax filings. When payroll malfunctions, it can lead to significant disruptions and potential legal and financial consequences. This comprehensive guide will explore the common causes of QuickBooks Desktop payroll issues and provide detailed troubleshooting steps to restore functionality. Q&A: Q: Why am I getting an error message that says "QuickBooks Desktop is unable to connect to the payroll service"? A: This error message indicates that QuickBooks Desktop cannot establish a connection to Intuit's payroll servers. Check your internet connection, firewall settings, and Intuit server status. Q: My payroll service key is correct, but I still can't process payroll. What else could be wrong? A: Other potential causes include outdated QuickBooks Desktop software, a corrupted company file, firewall interference, or Intuit server issues. Q: How do I know if my payroll tax tables are up to date? A: Go to "Employees" > "Get Payroll Updates." QuickBooks Desktop will check for and download any available updates. Q: Can a corrupted QuickBooks Desktop company file prevent me from processing payroll? A: Yes, data corruption can affect various functionalities, including payroll. Run QuickBooks Desktop Verify and Rebuild Data to fix potential issues. Q: What should I do if Intuit's payroll servers are down? A: Wait for Intuit to resolve the server issue. You can check their website or contact support for updates. Q: I have recently updated my firewall. Could this be the cause of the issue? A: Yes, firewall updates can sometimes change security settings and block QuickBooks Desktop. Temporarily disable your firewall to see if it resolves the issue. Q: Can I process payroll if my payroll subscription has expired? A: No, an active payroll subscription is required to process payroll. Q: I am getting an error message referring to an "authentication issue." What could be causing this? A: Authentication issues can arise from incorrect service keys, internet connectivity problems, incorrect time and date settings, or firewall interference. Q: Will reinstalling QuickBooks Desktop fix the problem? A: Reinstalling QuickBooks Desktop can fix some issues, especially if the program files are corrupted. However, it is best to try the other troubleshooting steps first. Q: I am using QuickBooks Desktop in a multi-user environment. Could this affect payroll processing? A: Yes, ensure that all users have the necessary permissions and that the company file is not in single-user mode when processing payroll. It is recommended to process payroll from the computer hosting the company file. Q: My payroll calculations are incorrect. What should I do? A: First, verify that your payroll tax tables are up to date. Then, carefully review your employee information, payroll item setup, and tax settings for accuracy. If you are still experiencing issues, contact Intuit Payroll Support. Q: How do I ensure my QuickBooks Desktop and Payroll versions are compatible? A: Check Intuit's website or contact their support. They maintain documentation on compatible versions. If you updated recently, there may be a delay before the versions are compatible.