I have refocussed my daily newsletter, which hasn’t been daily in quite a while now anyway, to concentrate more on what I seem to be spending most of my time doing: analysing and criticising the press and its reporting of the news. To better reflect what the publication is about, I’ve also rebranded it to Eye on The Press.

“The Sleepy Fox” Is Now “Eye on The Press”

When I became a journalist over a decade ago, I did so because I love writing and because I thought I could do a better job at it than most of the people I saw covering the news at the time. A lot has changed since then. And not for the better. Journalists of all creeds and colours have become obsessed with writing about what should be, instead of what is.

The press is enormously powerful. In many ways, what becomes recorded history is not what actually happened, but what was reported to have happened. Journalists shape not only the opinions of society, in the information age, they shape reality itself. Like everyone else, politicians and leaders get their view of what happens around them from the media. If the press is convinced that a problem exists, or that something that is happening is a danger to society, sooner rather than later, so will everyone else. Including the ones who have to power to do something about it — as misguided as that may be.

That is why I think it is only prudent that someone should watch what the press is up to. And report on it. This publication exists to, in my small way, do my part in this. I might not see everything and I might not have enough time to cover all the things I do see, but I feel it is very important to at least try. And as someone who has had intimate experience in the trenches of daily news journalism, I at least know how the game is played and what irregularities to watch for.

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I guess there are as many idiots in journalism as there are in any other profession. But in a job mostly consisting of writing down your innermost thoughts on an issue for everyone to see, being an idiot is especially embarrassing. Usually, you have colleagues, including editors, to prevent you from making embarrassing mistakes, but it more and more feels like these people often aren’t much smarter than the person writing the story. Which is why we more frequently get dumb coverage like this story in The Atlantic.

Elon Musk’s Text Messages Explain Everything

The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth. “In one sense, the texts show that billionaires are just like us – they’re not doing advanced calculus; they’re in their DMs talking smack, making jokes, and trying desperately to get their way,” Lauren Pringle, the editor in chief of The Chancery Daily, told me recently. But she added: “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”

Who are these people writing this shit? What did they expect? Did they, until they read Elon Musk’s text messages, really believe that rich people were somehow more intelligent or better people? Why? By virtue of being rich? And is it honestly news to you that rich people don’t operate like you and me, who have to hold down a job and struggle to put food on the table every day? What exactly makes you think that someone who has more money than a human being can even properly conceptualise would have the same problems as us? Why does it surprise you that people who literally have more money than they know what to do with would treat that money callously?

Elon Musk isn’t the first billionaire. How can you claim to write books, articles and even a newsletter called Galaxy Brain with authority on topics such as technology, media and “big ideas” and not understand the most obvious facts of life on this planet? Where do they get these numbskulls? And why does nobody notice the crud these people publish?

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Remember Private Internet Access and their SEO scams? Well, guess what, they are still at it! This time, they are using a shady outfit called CyberWebPros. These guys are such pros at the CyberWeb, that their website is a broken launch countdown.

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“The investigative journalist is the propagandist’s natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest , while the latter tends to work against it."

— Mark Crispin Miller, introduction to the 2005 Ig Publishing edition of Edward Bernays' Propaganda

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More Sleazy SEO Scams

Want your link on my website? Hint: Fraudulently claiming you’re a CNet editor is not the way to do it.
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We have now reached a stage of collective madness where a drug that could potentially save thousands of lives is actually seen as bad, because it doesn’t fit the accepted propaganda line. Or as Matt Taibbi puts it so eloquently:

Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings.

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The Wall Street Journal once again very good at pulling people into a story, even if the story is largely just what anyone with a modicum of common sense would expect:

I mean, why are you surprised? The reason for this is obviously that many people are only working half as much when they are working from home. I can’t possibly be the only one who noticed productivity tanking across the board with all kinds of organisations last year – from Ikea’s invoice department to all kinds of support hotlines to governmental offices and even regarding teachers in schools (from what I hear from people who have kids.)

There are clearly people who work well (and a lot) when left largely to their own devices. I’ve been a freelancer working for myself for almost three years now, I ought to know. But these people are clearly in the minority. Most people just work less, the less supervision they have. And it should surprise nobody that some of these people have figured out how they can work just the same at home, just for two employers making bank twice. Especially in America. Come on, you don’t have to be a genius to figure this out!

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Guess what? The Hunter Biden laptop stuff was real. And it was actively supressed with counter-propaganda in the media. I mean, it was obvious to me. I went on the record on episode 48 of The Private Citizen saying so. But now we have another good analysis that indicates this. Glenn Greenwald, who quit the publication he founded over this farce, has a good analysis of all the lies and propaganda by the CIA, the Democrat-allied press and the big tech companies on his Substack:

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How to lie and cheat to get a good search engine ranking for your client, the PureImagin way.
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The Trouble with Fact Checks

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I feel that if you publish fact checks, you should be able to interpret data correctly.
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