The SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT —
"[The] blog he developed was something that made the district better." - Tim Jemal, SOCCCD BoT President, 7/24/23
Sevim Dagdelen takes the Scholz government to task for its lack of “strength and will” in responding to Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the U.S. sabotage of the Russian pipeline. Video and text of her Feb. 10 speech to the Bundestag.
Nonpartisan, publicly funded media is "an idea that we should explore," said the senator.
...“[N]obody has ever come up to me, not one reporter—not you, not anybody else—and said, ‘Bernie, why are we spending twice as much on healthcare as any other country and yet we have 85 million uninsured or underinsured?’ How many programs at CBS, NBC, ABC had on why we have a dysfunctional healthcare system? Does that have anything to do with who owns the major networks? ‘Bernie, what are you going to do about income and wealth inequality?’ … ‘Why are billionaires paying an effective tax rate lower than working class people?’ No one asked me those questions.”....
The renowned investigative reporter is interviewed about the allegations that President Joe Biden authorised a covert military operation to destroy the pipeline which transports natural gas to Germany from Russia.
…Please start to lay out your findings in detail. What happened precisely according to your source, who was involved, and what were the motives behind it?
What I’ve done is simply explain the obvious. It was just a story that was begging to be told. In late September of 2022, eight bombs were supposed to go off; six went off under the water near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, in the area where it is rather shallow. They destroyed three of the four major pipelines in Nord Stream 1 and 2.
Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it. On February 7, 2022, in the buildup to the war in Ukraine, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, at a press conference at the White House with German chancellor Olaf Scholz, said that we can stop Nord Stream....
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I’ll tell you something. The operational people, the people who do kinetic things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon that he could use in negotiations.
But at some point, once the Russians went in, and then when the operation was done, this became increasingly odious to the people who did it. [My emphasis.]These are well-trained people; they are in the highest level of secret intelligence agencies. They turned on the project. They thought this was an insane thing to do. And within a week, or three or four days after the bombing, after they did what they were ordered to, there was a lot of anger and hostility. This is obviously reflected in the fact that I’m learning so much about it.
And I’ll tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened. I’m telling you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn’t get the story from them but I learned quickly they know….
. . .
So what’s your sense of the motives of the US government, if they blew up the pipeline?
I don’t think they thought it through. I know this sounds strange. I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There certainly are people in the American economy who like the idea of us being more competitive. We’re selling LNG, liquefied gas, at extremely big profits; we’re making a lot of money on it. I’m sure there were some people thinking, boy, this is going to be a long-time boost for the American economy.
But in that White House, I think the obsession was always re-election, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to get a victory, they want Ukraine to somehow magically win.
There could be some people who think maybe it’ll be better for our economy if the German economy is weak, but that’s crazy thinking. I think, basically, that we’ve bitten deep into something that’s not going to work. The war is not going to turn out well for this government.
How do you think this war could end?
It doesn’t matter what I think. What I know is there’s no way this war is going to turn out the way we want, and I don’t know what we’re going to do as we go further down the line. It scares me if the president was willing to do this.
And the people who did this mission believed that the president did realise what he was doing to the people of Germany, that he was punishing them for a war that wasn’t going well. And in the long run, this is going to be very detrimental not only to his reputation as the president but politically too. It’s going to be a stigma for America.
So what you have is a White House that thought it may have a losing card: Germany and Western Europe may stop giving the arms we want and the German chancellor could turn the pipeline on – that was always a fear. I would be asking a lot of questions to Chancellor Scholz. I would ask him what he learned in February when he was with the president. The operation was a big secret, and the president wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about this capability. But he does talk. He says things that he doesn’t want to….
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
…Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”…. (continue reading)
...My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences.
One traditional journalistic standard that wasn’t always followed in the Trump-Russia coverage is the need to report facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative. In January 2018, for example, the New York Times ignored a publicly available document showing that the FBI’s lead investigator didn’t think, after ten months of inquiry into possible Trump-Russia ties, that there was much there. This omission disserved Times readers. The paper says its reporting was thorough and “in line with our editorial standards.”....
…More and more journalists of color and younger White reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, in increasingly diverse newsrooms believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view.
“There is some confusion about the value of good reporting versus point of view,” said current Post executive editor Sally Buzbee, who noted that many journalists want to make a difference on such issues as climate change, immigration and education. “We stress the value of reporting,” she said, “what you are able to dig up — so you (the reader) can make up your own mind.”
“The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong,” Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, told us. “Objectivity has got to go.”....
Gerth's blockbuster piece—it comes in four parts—is a near book-length assessment, by this veteran New York Times journalist, of the mainstream press's handling of "Russiagate" (Steele dossier, etc.), perhaps the biggest story of the early Trump era.
Gerth's assessment: A complete fiasco suggesting an abandonment of time-honored standards of objectivity. (The mainstream press clearly got the story wrong and then doubled-down instead of acknowledging error.)
Gerth's remarkable piece is devastating; naturally, it is being ignored.
Downie's piece announces that the Washington Post no longer seeks objectivity in its reporting. I.e., it is a declaration of rejection of the old "objectivity" standards.
Golly.
"Be it resolved, don't trust the mainstream media."
On the PRO side of the debate were Douglas Murray (The Spectator) and Matt Taibbi (TK News on Substack). On the CON side of the debate were Malcolm 'Malc' Gladwell (The New Yorker, Revisionist History) and Michelle Goldberg (The New York Times).
✅ German Lawmaker Calls for Nord Stream Probe 
