Reeling from the absurd news that LA Times reporter Paul Pringle won the Pulitzer today for…investigative journalism.
This is the guy who first called me to tell me the LAPD had given him an audio that proved I lied about being handcuffed during a 2001 jaywalking arrest.
He treated me like I was guilty and needed to prove my innocence. His logic was insane. He asked why, if Officer Durr tossed my driver’s license to the ground, why couldn’t we hear it hit? (It’s paper?) He volunteered that he knew the audio was authentic and not spliced because…the LAPD told him it wasn’t.
He kept wanting to know why you couldn’t hear me arguing with the cop. (I never said I argued. I said I was polite and compliant.) When I said I was scared of the cop, he scoffed—especially when I pointed out that cops are allowed to kill you.
Later, like the rest of the staff, he discovered that I had told the truth due to the enhanced audio. A real reporter would have quit his job and joined my legal defense after that.
What a fool.
20 Comments.
Ted, I’m always amazed that such corrupt institutions as the LAT allow you to be published by them at all.
They know that simple truths have the capacity to unravel and devalue the work of their highly compensated idiots and liars.
I’ve been calling the so-called main stream media fake news long before I ever knew that Trump was considered by the right to be a significant intellectual.
But I have a bad memory. I remember too much.
It makes it difficult to engage with those who have little memory, and hence no backstory context against which they might judge fake news. Or my observations, since I can’t give a conversant context without it coming off as a lecture.
They have that capacity but I fear it often goes unrealised. How many people on the street, if they’re at all aware of this, would take Ted’s side over the LAT?
Mainstream media is awful. At least with Info Wars and the like, as well as the classic online fake news, it’s pretty easy to see how fake it is – unless you really want to believe them. Respectable news sources make it much easier for people to be deceived by them – and in practice they lie like they breathe, sometimes by omissions and misrepresentation, and sometimes with outright deceptions, like in this case.
For sure. MSM lies at becoming more brazen. Yesterday NPR reported that Russia gave the hacked DNC emails to WikiLeaks as objective fact when in fact there is no evidence to support it and plenty of evidence against it (it was a leak by a DNC staffer and the data was taken via thumb drive).
The media blackout of my case confirms it. Every piece of bad news gets reported—like when the lower courts ruled against me. Good news, like the California Supreme taking my appeal, gets no coverage. I have to think that most people would be appalled if they knew a major paper was owned by the police, that its publisher was hopelessly corrupt and is now a school superintendent, and that they argue in court that “the truth doesn’t matter.”
But they will never know.
«Yesterday NPR reported that Russia gave the hacked DNC emails to WikiLeaks as objective fact …» But Ted, both the New York Times and the Washington Post report this matter in precisely the same way – therefore it must be true. And as we know, the truth value of a proposition increases in proportion to the number of times it is repeated :
Henri
For what it’s worth, I see that he (Pringle) is the third listed reporter. I wonder how the other two reporters feel about his reporting [sic] in your case? Have either of them gone on record?
If you win your case, you should demand the Pulitzer committee revisit their decision.
As far as I know, no LA Times reporter or employee has ever so much as issued a tweet about my case. Considering that these are supposedly journalists, people who work with words, it’s extremely telling about how terrified they are of their current publisher. One would assume that there may even be reporters there who hate me or don’t believe me or whatever, but even they are too afraid to speak up. This is not the way journalism used to be.
I suspect that if and when I get to discovery, and the LA Times coughs up the tape recording of my conversations with Paul Pringle, all I will have to do to have the Pulitzer Prize stripped away by Columbia University is to post the recording online. It will be a great irony. Live by the audio recording, die by the audio recording.
What’s on that recording is not the work of an investigative journalist, but rather a miserable terrified hack having been sent like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse now to conduct an assassination. There’s no attempt at logic, no pretense of objectivity, total refusal to listen to logic. I didn’t feel like I was talking to a reporter. I felt like I was talking to a cop.
When you do the book, you can offer a CD with it. My God, it’ll be huge. Bigger than Jesus.
Keep in mind, Ted, that back in 1973 den Norske Nobelkomite decided to award Nobels fredpris to a man named Heinz Alfred Kissinger (aka Henry Alfred Kissinger). After that, irony has lost its bite….
Henri
“Norske Nobelkomite decided to award Nobels fredpris to a man named Heinz Alfred Kissinger”
And then awarded the prize to Obama, not for anything he did, but for what they imagined in their naive, fractured, mindset, that he was going to do.
Norske Nobelkomite have not proven to be adept at history, nor at prophesying.
Ted, I’m always amazed that such corrupt institutions as the LAT allow you to be published by them at all.
I think the technical term is figleaf?
Bourdieu documented that academic institutions actively take steps to give some appointments to proponents of heterodox ideas – ideally to contrarians. Then both sides can get busy arguing back and forth until the cows come home. It gives the institution the veneer of healthy debate which often is superficial or illusory. Naturally they are not actually going to give enough funding so that alternative programs become actually viable.
One can extend this to journalism as well, including cartooning. I.e. the Guardian has George Monbiot and Owen Jones on the payroll, while the Independent features Robert FIsk and Patrick Cockburn.
In the U.S. there is, well, let me think, guys help me out here? Noam Chomsky has a regular column in – wait, no he hasn’t, has he? Brian McFadden draws cartoons for the NYT, oh right, they let him go.
Managers in the U.S. should read more Bourdieu.
EDIT: was supposed to be a reply to Glenn.
Contrarianism in the U.S is actively loathed. Evidence in defense of assertion: Look at the treatment Bernie Sanders is getting from the MSM.
Extrapolation from evidence: As you observed, the debate needs to continue until the cows come home. Contrarians such as Bernie Sanders in the political realm are death for the 24-hour news cycle.
This is not limited to Sanders. The two current cow-home-comings are gun control and abortion.
The majority of abortions are now done by pharmaceuticals. The pregnant woman (or girl), obtains the requisite pills and the pregnancy ends. Roe v. Wade drops further into chimeric obsolescence. And both sides face a huge fund-raising deficit. “What will we use to scare the living, walking, talking sh!t out of the dems or the Republicans if we can’t wave abortion in their faces?” This is why the dems are so scared about Sanders getting universal single-payer healthcare.
And next? Gun control. The innumerate media shriekers keep going around the same circuit. Guns are bad. Guns kill people. Thoughts and prayers. They’re coming to talk our guns. What’s next, gas chambers? We have to stockpile. Etc.
The reality is this–and the numbers support it–the vast number of gun owners are not dangerous. 40,000 people died in the U.S. from guns last year. Almost half a million died from smoking last year.
Hello Andreas,
I strongly agree with you and Bourdieu.
I’ve read a few books by Bourdieu.
His little book, “On Television” should be read by anyone who has an interest in the media.
To your post:
Honesty is the best policy [for news media]. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Therefore, fake news.
And:
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled”— attributed to Mark Twain, noted supporter of the Anti-Imperialist League, which puts Ted, as a humorist who ruffles the feathers of American Imperialists, in good company.
Pultizers are awarded for specific accomplishments, aren’t they? For all I know, he may have even earned this one, and the one he got before. Not that this changes what you say, of course – the man you describe there has no integrity. If he really is such a good investigative reporter whose work is worthy of the Pulitzer, it is if anything more damning, as it means that he deliberately shut off his intellect in order to help them persecute you.
On a related note, I was just going back to a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Robert Johnson on democracy know about the Russiagate debacle. I was at first surprised at how openly angry Greenwald was. Really openly pissed and disdainful. Not great strategically, I’m sure the tone lost him some viewers who might have come around. But then I thought about what it must be like to be smart and careful and dedicated in your profession and be locked out year after year while all of these morons and charlatans just keep on rolling. I’d be pretty pissed too, both personally and because of the damage they are doing. The worst of it is that they keep proving Trump right. It really is fake news, a lot of it anyway. What a godawful mess. Anyway, I look forward to hearing about that Pulitzer being withdrawn.
«Yesterday NPR reported that Russia gave the hacked DNC emails to WikiLeaks as objective fact …» But Ted, both the New York Times and the Washington Post report this manner in precisely the same way – therefore it must be true. And as we know, the truth value of a proposition increases in proportion to the number of times it is repeated :
Henri
“And as we know, the truth value of a proposition increases in proportion to the number of times it is repeated.”
Also, in compliance with the truism “The louder the truer”.
I just read that Tom Friedman and Peggy Noonan are recipients of the Putlizer prize.
On that basis, it appears Pringle got what he richly deserved.
Falco, falco – what do you have against one of the foremost oracles of our latter times, Thomas Loren Friedman ?!! No doubt he agrees with our local foul-mouthed troll that it’s all the fault of those dastardly Russians (that is, when it’s not the fault of those nefarious Chinese)…. 😉
Henri
Hi Henri,
Certainly it is no surprise that Tom “almost perfect-vacuum cranium” Friedman would gleefully jump on the dastardly Russkis bandwagon – there being very few empire
-manufactured/-approved bandwagons he has not loyally, if vapidly, monetized.
But I must say, not having read anything of his in at least two decades, (and not much prior) I lack direct knowledge of what, no doubt, are the uniquely idiotic particulars of his Russki-gate musings.
«But I must say, not having read anything of his in at least two decades, (and not much prior) I lack direct knowledge of what, no doubt, are the uniquely idiotic particulars of his Russki-gate musings.» Say what one will about dear Mr Friedman, falco, but it’s easier to avoid his «musings» than those of our local foul-mouthed troll…. 😉
Henri