patrick.net

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/business/mark-zuckerberg-meta-fact-check.html



OMGLOLWTF

Does the NY Times have any idea how much they sound like The Babylon Bee now?

Although it was completely predictable, the New York Times still ran perhaps its stupidest article in a long series of cognitively compromised columns, this one capped with the stunningly imbecilic headline, “As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency.” A far more honest headline would have been, “Trump’s Sentencing Proves Liberal Lawfare Complete Waste of Time.” ...

After everything, after spending $80-million-plus (?) and who knows how much political capital to obtain the first criminal conviction of a U.S. president, Judge Merchan bravely sentenced Trump to nothing. No jail, no fine, no probation, not even community service.

Merchan’s unprecedented non-sentence left the Times with very little ammunition to work with, but it did it’s lying best. In the Times’ view, Trump has been punished: politically.

“TrUmP is tHe fIrSt FeLoN pReSiDeNt!!”

“While Mr. Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties,” the Times’s glum reporter noted with the slightest hint of finding a bright side, “he effectively had the word ‘felon’ tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction.”

Hahaha! Stop it! It’s too much! The best slam the Times could come up with was this is going on his permanent record. That is, effectively permanent. But not actually permanent! Because Trump’s appeal is still pending, and it’s pending under a whole new regime. So. ...

The reporter scared up an appropriate, if false, quotation from Barack Obama’s former lawyer who sadly said “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

Please. That is a progressive fantasy. Not only do we know exactly how to react, we did react. We re-elected the felon. Nor are we numb or in shock; we are furious. And we’re not going to let sold-out corporate media get away with it this time.

On Thursday, Fortune published one of the most remarkable articles I can recall, which also remarkably replaced an overheated article published earlier in the day. The replacement article ran under a one-word, all-caps headline: “CORRECTION.” Here is the entire new article:

CORRECTION: On January 9, Fortune published an article titled "Elon Musk is pushing to
remove dates from X posts and planning new $8 sign up fee." After publication, Fortune
learned that a source that was central to this story had intentionally misled our reporter over
a series of exchanges. The sourcing and story do not meet our editorial standards, and the story
has been deleted. We apologize to readers and to Mr. Musk and employees of X.

It sounds hilarious and it was. Fortune figured out that a single X user named “SpaceSudoer” had catfished the corporate media outlet into running a 100% fake story intended to mock Elon Musk. Yesterday, a new ‘Fortune Exposed’ account took credit (it seems SpaceSudoer created the Fortune Exposed account for this purpose):



In a series of posts, SpaceSudoer described how he’d answered a prompt seeking X whistleblowers at the bottom of one of reporter Kali Hays’ articles. So he pretended to be a disgruntled X employee and made up a story about being relocated. When Kali bit, he offered an outrageous tale of getting fired by Elon personally, after he pushed back on Elon’s dumb idea to “remove dates from X posts” and cancel the free account option.

Reporter Hays asked him for some supporting evidence, like an email or screenshot, which SpaceSudoer did not provide, ghosting her. He said he was then “surprised” to see Fortune run with the story, multiplying his fake, anonymous “whistleblowing” report into two anonymous sources:

Musk has floated the idea of nixing date and
time stamps from the timeline to X to
employees in recent weeks, a person familiar
with internal conversations told Fortune. The
suggestion, which has raised worries among
some staffers for its potential to exacerbate
misinformation, comes as X is moving ahead
with a separate plan to begin charging new
users an $8 fee to sign up and begin posting on
the platform, two sources told Fortune.

Ruh roh. Not only did Fortune fall for being journalistically catfished —without evidence— but it also lied about its sourcing.

Lying corporate media is on life support. I keep telling you these articles quoting only anonymous sources are pure propaganda. If it fits the narrative, any bad actor can supply willing corporate media reporters who will neither try to confirm or deny the story, but will merely run with it so long as its politically helpful.

Kali could have emailed X and asked for a comment. I know it’s a lot of work, but still. I’m just saying. She didn’t check because she didn’t want to know.

If we had a functioning corporate media instead of a sold-out, deep-state propaganda operation, Fortune would not have deleted its article in panic. Instead, it would have published a much more introspective follow-up story explaining what went wrong, how it violated its own journalistic standards, and how it plans to fix it to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Instead, all we got was a “CORRECTION” that blamed everything on the spoofer. As though Fortune has some right to expect anonymous tipsters to be scrupulous with the truth, so that it need not do any journalism work itself.

Remember — we were this close being forced to accept that the only credible sources of information were Fortune and the rest of corporate media.

Is it spreading misinformation when Fortune does it?

Well, it’s his own fault. Elon neglected to submit his speech six weeks in advance for prior review by the Global Gesture Compliance Committee of the World Economic Forum in Brussels. Had he done so, the GGCC would have indicated that his proposed arm motion fell under the chapter ‘Faux Paus’ in the Committee’s Manual on Acceptable Waving (see page 1116).

The sad part is it could have been so easily avoided, had he just flashed the standard GGCC-approved princess wave, or even just flicked his wrist in a feminine downwards thrust at the finish. But with one careless arm-flail, Elon’s semaphore signal accidentally unlocked the Fourth Reich, a deplorable DLC module whose armies are assembling even now, and which, as you read this, are Goose Stepping their way through a fantastic zone of feverish progressive imagination.

Seriously though, the corporate media is so easy to troll. I’d bet decent money Elon created this controversy on purpose, taking a page from Trump’s own media-trollbook. Since progressives are so desperate for something to cling to, to reassure themselves as virtuous despite Trump’s landslide, they’ll even latch on to something as dumb as this.

This fracas over Elon’s wave is the adult equivalent of a child on a long car ride complaining that the other child keeps staring at them. He’s still looking at me!