Category Archives: Media

The Fourth Estate (Media) Moving Country Into Third Dimension

Hollywood, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, Technology

Being part of major US media—the Fourth Estate—means moving into a Third Dimension of your own making and taking the country with you. What was it that the Bush neoconservative Karl Rove once asserted at the heights of that regime’s manipulation of reality?

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

As was suggested over these pixelated pages, the “Hollywood hack hysteria” was a media event, not a journalistic investigation, as all news reporting should be. Accordingly, “the moron media shared speculations but not much credible evidence as to the source of the hack.”

It was left to an unconventional citizen-journalist-cum-blogger using conventional journalistic methods to uncover Jonathan Gruber’s utterances. Ditto the Sony hack attack. A blog called North Korea Tech by Martyn Williams did the digging. It

details inconsistencies in the Sony attack and past attacks by North Korea.
“Computers at Sony displayed a message threatening the release of internal documents if undisclosed demands were not met. North Korean hackers have never made such public demands,” Williams writes.
He also notes that little is known about Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. No group has claimed credit in past North Korean hacks.
Williams said that the hackers stole sensitive information about movie stars, staff, and Sony management. In an apparently personal attack, the hackers posted a message on the Twitter accounts of Sony employees. This gives credence to the growing theory that the attack was an inside job.
Tommy Stiansen, the chief technology officer for Norse, a hacker-tracking company, told Bloomberg that he plans to approach the FBI and Mandiant, the private company researching the attack, with information that implicates a disgruntled Sony employee in Japan in the attack.

MORE.

The Dynamics Of Media Moral Inversion

Media, Morality, Propaganda, Race, Racism

On the one hand, there’s Brooke Baldwin. She’s a CNN bimbo, not as bad as a Fox News issue—the spandex swaddled Gretchen Carlson comes to mind—but nevertheless a prototype airhead, on the air for her looks. Brooke’s brief at CNN is the enforcement of progressivism, the deconstruction of conventional news broadcasting and morality.

On the other hand, you have Charles Barkley, “basketball analyst for Turner Sports and former NBA great.” He’s no philosopher king, but high concentrations of cutaneous melanin have qualified him to be a philosopher king in contemporary America.

Barkley called the Ferguson rioters “scumbags,” a perfectly reasonable descriptive for “the rioters who set buildings and police cars on fire in Ferguson,” not to mention murdered a cracker or two.

In the universe Brooke brings to her CNN viewers, berating black looters and murderers is controversial, a position that requires “defending,” or so she framed here interview with Barkley:

“Charles Barkley defends calling Ferguson rioters ‘scumbags.’”

Dr. Ben Carson, a self-made man who has never relied on race to excel, has no problem articulating immutable moral truth: “The Community Has to Recognize That a Thug Is a Thug.”

On Michael Brown, Libertarians Line-Up Like Mainstream

Crime, libertarianism, Media, Paleolibertarianism

With the exception of Professor Walter E. Block, libertarians, lite and hard-core, have lined-up like a monolith—much as mainstream media has—on the side of conspiracy and counteract, in the matter of Michael Brown’s shooting by Darren Wilson. (At least Reason.com has been willing to entertain differences of opinion.) Broad patterns of police transgression exist. However, each “cop killing” must be decided on the merits of the facts. Regrettably, this libertarian column had also expressed the opinion that Brown was the victim of “murder-by-cop.” I was wrong and have corrected myself.

Mentor and friend Walter Block did not fall in lockstep. Here’s the lovely comment received after the publication of “Ferguson: Thankful for Founding Fathers’ Legal Legacy”:

Dear Ilana:

Yet another eloquent, beautifully argued, magnificently written article, greatly informed by a libertarian sense of justice. Congratulations once again.

Best regards,

Walter

Walter E. Block, Ph.D.
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics
Joseph A. Butt, S.J. College of Business
Loyola University New Orleans

Tyranny Strives For Uniformity: The Onslaught Against Steve Hofmeyr

Free Speech, Media, Natural Law, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa

South African media (even more illiberal than America’s) have almost nothing positive to say about Steve Hofmeyr, an immensely popular singer, songwriter, actor and Afrikaner activist. (In the new multicultural South Africa, Afrikaner identity is tantamount to a “racist” identity, naturally.) For speaking out of turn, the forces of tyranny have converged on Hofmeyr with the intent to silence him, and worse. Note the sovietized nomenclature used to bring one man to heel and to induce conformity: Hofmeyr is said to go against “nation-building,” to be “extremely abnormal,” to express a “startling sentiment.”

OMG!

A fellow named Brad Cibane, in training at the American Ivy League (which, increasingly, does not stand for true intellectual excellence) to excel as Conformity Enforcer in South Africa, illustrates his terrifying notion of allowable speech. Deploying somewhat specious distinctions such as the “vertical right to free speech vs. horizontal right to free speech”— Cibane does, however, make a valid point with respect to Hofmeyr’s court injunction against a clown called Conrad Koch. Both have a natural right to speak out of turn. Nevertheless, I do understand Hofmeyr wanting to use all arrows in his quiver because the deck—the state included—is stacked against him and his cause.

The libertarian imperative here is to deal with the meta-issues, leaving out the substance of the offending words: They are irrelevant. As this column has explained, policing what people say for political propriety is not a dance in which libertarians should partake—it is “a dance adopted by the political establishment to cow contrarians into submission. By going on the defensive—allowing themselves to be drawn into these exchanges—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from “polite” company.”