The Almost God-Like Power of AI

Or is that of the BBC? 6/18/26 Houston Chronicle:

International visitors to Houston this summer are enjoying the full splendor of the Bayou City, from Houston's iconic stadiums to its sprawling gas stations, to its delicious beer and barbecue.

One international news outlet added one other feature to Houston during its broadcast of the 2026 FIFA World Cup on Wednesday: majestic mountains.

No, that's not a typo. BBC, the British news outlet, hosted a World Cup studio show on Wednesday shortly after the completion of DR Congo's 1-1 draw against Portugal in the second 2026 World Cup match held at Houston Stadium. The studio show broadcast an AI-generated image of Houston's skyline in the background as analysts discussed the match, featuring a largely accurate depiction. One issue with the AI image? The left side of the screen was adorned with rolling foothills and mountains, depicting a scene more fit for Los Angeles, Salt Lake City or Phoenix than Houston.

This is a problem at two levels: the misuse of AI (although an ordinary green screen can also be manipulated to have this effect) and a reminder of how little BBC, often considered a good standard for news media, cars about truth. 

My wife's great concern about AI is is power to deceive.  If young people were receiving adequate educations, this would be less of a problem.  Seeing the Apollo 11 footage with a tiny set of McDonald's arches, or more realistically with a microphone boom shadow in the foreground, will deceive many 

Grand Jury Transcripts Release

12/9/25 CNBC:

 A New York federal judge on Tuesday ordered the unsealing of grand jury materials and other documents related to the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite convicted in 2021 of procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein.

Judge Paul Engelmayer's order came at the request of the Department of Justice, which cited the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Congress passed last month.

So what will Democrats claim now?  Trump's DOJ asked for their release and here they are. This 12/8/25 Bloomberg News article is paywalled but the headline shows that the PreCrime Investigation Division now has a PreNews Reporting Division: "As Epstein Files Deadline Nears, Here's What Might Emerge."

Mass Murder That Will Get No American Media Coverage

6/26/21 BBC:

The 24-year-old suspect, a Somali immigrant, grabbed a knife from the kitchen section of a department store, attacking several inside. He then lashed out at people outside.

Five women and a child were also injured in the attack.

Police say the suspect was possibly psychologically unstable and may have held extremist Islamist beliefs...

A witness reported that the suspect shouted "Allah Akbar" during the attack, said Mr Herrmann.

But a police spokesman said that, while the attacker had a criminal record, none of his previous offences were related to terrorism.

The Untrustworthiness of the Offiiclal News Media

 6/9/21 Substack article by Glenn Greenwald, the last honest leftist journalist:

For more than a year, it has been consecrated media fact that former President Donald Trump and his White House, on June 1 of last year, directed the U.S. Park Police to use tear gas against peaceful Lafayette Park protesters, all to enable a Trump photo-op in front of St. John's Church. That this happened was never presented as a possibility or likelihood but as indisputable truth. And it provoked weeks of unmitigated media outrage, presented as one of the most egregious assaults on the democratic order in decades.

This tale was so pervasive in the media landscape that it would be impossible for any one article to compile all the examples. “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op,” read the NPR headline on June 1. The New York Times ran with: “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church.” CNN devoted multiple segments to venting indignation while the on-screen graphic declared: “Peaceful Protesters Near White House Tear-Gassed, Shot With Rubber Bullets So Trump Can Have Church Photo Op.”...

All of this came crashing down on their heads on Wednesday afternoon. The independent Inspector General of the Interior Department, Mark Lee Greenblatt, issued his office's findings after a long investigation into “the actions of the U.S. Park Police (USPP) to disperse protesters in and around Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2020.” Greenblatt has been around Washington for a long time, occupying numerous key positions in the Obama administration, including investigative counsel at the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General and Assistant Inspector General for Investigations at Obama's Commerce Department.

The letter released by Greenblatt's office accompanying the report makes clear how far-reaching the investigation was:

Over the course of this review, our career investigative staff conducted extensive witness interviews, reviewed video footage from numerous vantage points, listened to radio transmissions from multiple law enforcement entities, and examined evidence including emails, text messages, telephone records, procurement documents, and other related materials. This report presents a thorough, independent examination of that evidence to assess the USPP’s decision making and operations, including a detailed timeline of relevant actions and an analysis of whether the USPP’s actions complied with governing policies.

The IG's conclusion could not be clearer: the media narrative was false from start to finish. Namely, he said, “the evidence did not support a finding that the [U.S. Park Police] cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.” Instead — exactly as Hemingway's widely-mocked-by-liberal-outlets article reported — “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.” Crucially, “the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day."

CNN Obviously Thinks Only Idiots Watch Them

 

D-Day Ended an Intense Peace

ABC News tweets:

Protesters, not rioters.  A "peaceful demonstration intensified."  Did it become more peaceful, or more demonstrative.  What happens when journalism is taken over by ignorant people with a limited grasp of English.

You Say You Want a Revolution

They are quite prepared to see people die to shut them up.  They won't like what happens.  Neither will we.  These idiots are playing with fire, unaware that we have more and better matches.

Ever Wondered Why the News Media Mispredicted the 2016 Election?

7/30/19 The Hill:

While looking into this phenomenon in 2016, I contacted a number of polling groups. I knew that they “weight” and adjust their samples to make them reflect certain demographics of the U.S. population. In simple terms, if their sample ends up with too many young people, they assign greater weight to responses from older people. The methods they use to do so vary and are arcane, to say the least. For example, ABC states that it “adopted iterative weighting, also known as raking or rim weighting, in which the sample is weighted sequentially to Census targets one variable at a time, continuing until the optimum distribution is achieved.”

But one of the most interesting things I learned had to do with one big factor for which they typically don’t “weight” or adjust. It’s one that I think is arguably among the most important when it comes to polls measuring political issues: political affiliation. In other words, the national pollsters I spoke with told me that if they end up interviewing significantly more Democrats than Republicans — which is often the case — they don’t necessarily adjust the results to try to make the sample reflective of the U.S. voting population.

Wow!  You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Fake News in German

Der Spiegel, which I have always assumed was a reputablew news source, sent a reporter to a small town in Minnesota to understand Trumpville.  He wrote a gross falsification, thoroughly demolished by a couple of the local liberals, who think their neighbors voted against their own interests voting for Trump.

Of course the liar won an award from CNN.

When Even Journalists Tell Acosta, "You Are Doing It Wrong, It's a Sign

11/9/18 SF Chronicle column by Ruben Navarette (not in any way a right-winger) calling out Acosta'a behavior:

Still, Acosta deserved the rebuke. He was arrogant, rude and sanctimonious. He was sent to cover the story, and he made himself the story. He was supposed to ask questions, but instead he tried to “challenge” the president about the refugee caravan. He asked several questions, instead of one. And when he got answers, he rejected them. He used up time that could have gone to his colleagues. He hogged the microphone, and — at his worst moment — wrestled for control of it with a White House intern, as if it were his own private property.

Someone at CNN needs to slip this guy a note. He stopped being a journalist a while back, and his recent performance — and that’s the right word — at the White House demonstrates it.

In the end, I don’t care much about how Acosta treated Trump. He has a job to do, and it involves questioning the powerful.

I care more about how he treated his media colleagues, which is to say like he was the only reporter in the room — or, for that matter, on Planet Earth. Their deadlines and live shots were just as important as his.

And I care most about how he treated that poor intern who learned the hard way that the most dangerous place to be in Washington is between Jim Acosta and a microphone.

Behave Yourselves!

10/29/18 AP reports on attacks and insults that even local journalists are receiving for being "fake news."  There is a lot of fake news, like reporters pretending a hurricane's winds are pushing them around while people in the background are unaffected, and a steady stream of false reports so bad that some have led to a suspensions by news organizations--and many more that were not punished.  (Remember that many live in bubbles where they only see America from a distance.)  Violence is not ever acceptable and insulting local journalists (many of whom are not necessarily on the left) accomplishes nothing useful.  Just make sure you vote on Election Day, and give the Democratic Party PR wing something to really go ballistic over.

Why Trust in the News Media is Gone

9/14/18 Watts Up With That shows a picture of Anderson Cooper talking about how severe the flooding is from Trump's hurricane.  The problem is Cooper is in three feet of water because he is in a ditch.  His cameramen are on the road--not in three feet of water.

Okay, Weathermen Aren't Covering Politics

But if this level of deception is justified by a weather story, why would politics be any better?



Watch the guys in the background walk past unaffected by the wind.

We May Be Reaching a Tipping Point

You probably know the Manafort jurors asked the judge for clarification of "beyond a reasonable doubt."  Now the lamestream media are asking the judge to give them the names and addresses of the jurors.  Antifa on your doorstep?  This is such an obvious attempt to intimidate the jury.  We may be reaching the point of doxxing the lamestream media reporters to get the message across.

More Leftist Projection

The left says Trump supporters are racists.  So the New York Times just hired someone with a history of racist tweets that would even embarrass many Ivy League faculty.  You can read the horrendous examples here.  Do not kid yourselves; the left wants a race war, and the overprivileged whites who back them are going to wonder why they are targeted by their own allies.

Why Nothing From the News Media Can Be Trusted

If true, it's an accident, especially now that the famous video  of a polar bear dying because of climate change has now been admitted as deceptively captioned:

One year later, National Geographic has finally admitted to facilitating "fake news" regarding climate change. The magazine's most viral video ever, which featured heart-wrenching images of a starving polar bear, perpetuated the narrative that the animal's imminent death was caused by climate change. However, the climate change aspect of the story is void of any real evidence."We had lost control of the narrative," admitted Cristina Mittermeier, the photographer of the polar bear. Mittermeier explained the climate change deception in a piece titled "Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong" for the magazine's August issue.Mittermeier conceded that the images of the bony, emaciated polar bear were meant to sound an alarm about climate change, though she complains that people took the image "literally."

Leftist Concerns Turn Out to Be Projection

8/6/18 New Yorker:

For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America. As the chairman and C.E.O. of CBS Corporation, he oversees shows ranging from “60 Minutes” to “The Big Bang Theory.” His portfolio includes the premium cable channel Showtime, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and a streaming service, CBS All Access. Moonves, who is sixty-eight, has a reputation for canny hiring and project selection. The Wall Street Journal recently called him a “TV programming wizard”; the Hollywood Reporter dubbed him a “Wall Street Hero.” In the tumultuous field of network television, he has enjoyed rare longevity as a leader. Last year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he earned nearly seventy million dollars, making him one of the highest-paid corporate executives in the world.

In recent months, Moonves has become a prominent voice in Hollywood’s #MeToo movement. In December, he helped found the Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, which is chaired by Anita Hill. “It’s a watershed moment,” Moonves said at a conference in November. “I think it’s important that a company’s culture will not allow for this. And that’s the thing that’s far-reaching. There’s a lot we’re learning. There’s a lot we didn’t know.”

But Moonves’s private actions belie his public statements. Six women who had professional dealings with him told me that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result. “What happened to me was a sexual assault, and then I was fired for not participating,” the actress and writer Illeana Douglas told me. All the women said they still feared that speaking out would lead to retaliation from Moonves, who is known in the industry for his ability to make or break careers. “He has gotten away with it for decades,” the writer Janet Jones, who alleges that she had to shove Moonves off her after he forcibly kissed her at a work meeting, told me. “And it’s just not O.K.”

I just cannot take any of their complaints seriously anymore when the most prominent examples turn out to be their people.

Imagine the News Storm if One of Trump's Appointees Had Been Arrested & Convicted of This

7/27/18 Daily Mail:

Surveillance footage exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com shows one of President Obama’s senior officials following a woman around a DC Metro station and taking a picture up her skirt with his cell phone.

William Mendoza was caught on security cameras carrying out the vile act while he was executive director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education.

As a result of his actions, the married father pleaded guilty to attempted voyeurism and resigned from his $140,000-a-year Department of Education post in Obama’s White House.

His arrest and conviction were never made public until DailyMail.com acquired the report of the investigation and the footage through a Freedom of Information Act request.

And there were similar incidents involving other women.  Oh yes:

When he took the indecent photos, he was supposed to be at work and was using a travel card funded by the taxpayer, according to the documents obtained by DailyMail.com through a Freedom of Information Act request.

This makes drunk driving look positively mature.  This is something I would have expected of an ill-behaved junior high or high school guy of my generation to have done.   This curious lack of coverage when he was convicted is why Instapundit calls journalists "Democratic Party activists with bylines."  This is why I no longer believe much of anything negative about Trump from the news media anymore.

Who Knew Trump Was President Before the Election?

6/29/18 NBC News reports:

Officials have said that at least 2,342 children were separated from their parents after being apprehended crossing the border unlawfully since May 5, when the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy towards migrants went into effect.

But numbers provided to NBC News by the Department of Homeland Security show that another 1,768 were separated from their parents between October 2016 and February 2018, bringing the total number of separated kids to more than 4,100.

October 2016?  I thought Obama was still in charge until January 2017.

Why Americans No Longer Believe the News Media

A description of the gun used to kill reporters in Maryland:

.@PeteWilliamsNBC on the weapon used in the newsroom shooting: a shotgun is like a backwards funnel, you don’t have to have direct aim to hurt a lot of people. It was purchased legally.

Backwards funnel?  As a comment observed:

Two words: Chainsaw Bayonet