Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Big podcasters like Joe Rogan have people who spread false and misleading information on their podcasts and don’t properly pushback.
These podcasters provide an illusion of longform journalism without the principles of journalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26IvvpwTMZE
“When a would-be assassin’s bullet struck Donald Trump’s ear, Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci — dodging bullets himself — captured the iconic image of a bloodied Trump, rising to his feet and pumping his fist.
But for the past six weeks, Vucci has been barred from covering many other historic moments in the Trump White House, thanks to the president’s decision to punish the AP for its refusal to embrace his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.””
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/27/associated-press-court-hearing-trump-00253952
“Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported on Monday that he had been added by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to an encrypted Signal group chat with the White House’s principals committee to discuss U.S. war plans in Yemen. Goldberg received the first message at 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, and around two hours later, the White House announced a new air campaign against Houthi forces. The National Security Council confirmed the group chat was real and claimed Goldberg was added by accident.”
…
“The constitutional and policy merits of war are two separate questions, but they’re impossible to fully disentangle. The point of asking Congress for a declaration of war is to allow the people’s representatives to weigh the pros and cons in a deliberate, transparent way. War is the most serious decision a government can make. Citizens of a republic should not have to perform Kremlinology—or wait for an official to fat-finger his contact list—to figure out what their leaders are planning.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/25/the-atlantic-should-not-find-out-about-a-war-before-congress-does/
“What would be better than FOIA?
An employee of a federal agency, who was sick of constantly having her email searched for records requests, once floated the idea to me of proactive disclosure: Just redact and release everyone’s emails on a rolling basis.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-foia/
Megyn Kelly LOSING HER MIND Over Debate Moderators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK2T7bMqRqI
Elon Musk Keeps Humiliating Matt Taibbi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hT9gKGTasY
“If you are a journalist, life in Moscow means constant fear of reprisal; pissing off the state means certain imprisonment. If you enjoy gay bars or other forms of LGBT-oriented nightlife, get ready for police raids. If you’re an evangelical protestant, you will not be permitted to live out your faith. (Over the last decade, more than 500 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been convicted of or charged with extremism, with many serving sentences.) And, if you’re Ukrainian, well, sorry about your family getting brutally slaughtered and your homeland getting desecrated; hope you enjoy the clean subway system nonetheless.”
…
“One reason why we don’t have clean streets in New York the way they do in Singapore is because we don’t cane people for minor crimes. We don’t give people the death penalty for manufacturing drugs (200 grams of cannabis resin warrants execution, if you’re not careful), nor do we lock people in jail for a decade for the purported crime of getting high. We don’t crack down on jaywalking, spitting, or cigarette-smoking the way they do. We also don’t tend to use corporal punishment for our children.
Carlson’s point is fine that people care about quality of life issues, that Skid Row in Los Angeles and subway-station junkies in New York City are embarrassments, and that our city officials ought to be able to clean up the streets to improve the lives of taxpaying residents—not just when Xi Jinping comes to town. You might think existing public disorder needs to be curbed, but there are many possible ways of doing so that could still protect civil liberties and wouldn’t turn American cities into authoritarian hellholes. (In fact, we should probably turn to Russian out-migration numbers to see whether residents agree with Carlson’s assessment.)
I simply do not think we need to hand it to authoritarians under any circumstances or speak in flattering terms about Putin’s ability to govern. It’s not that compliments like these ought to be haram; it’s that Carlson is examining only one side of the ledger, and missing all the ways Russian laws rain down brutality on the innocent and undeserving. Just ask some of the tourists who’ve had their stays in Russia involuntarily prolonged, like Brittney Griner.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/13/tucker-dreams-of-moscow/
“Even if you despise the media, you should be rooting for more government transparency. Some of the worst journalism happens when no one has hard evidence one way or another and the only sources are government press releases and anonymous officials. Take for example the months of speculation surrounding the death of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, all of which was enabled by erroneous government statements and the fact that Capitol Police records and autopsy reports were confidential. As I wrote then, “In a vacuum of primary sources, bullshit will prevail. If you want faster, more accurate reporting, demand better public record laws and more transparency from officials.”
The power-hungry demagogues and partisan pundits trying to tear this country apart dream of a perfectly fact-free environment where anything can be claimed and nothing can be confirmed. Strong public record laws are the antidote to the farces and tragedies they would inflict.”
“”The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no,” former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth writes at the beginning of his detailed analysis. His old employer was at the center of the frenzy and its editors still defend their efforts, he adds. “But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.””
…
“It’s really hard to get to any sort of truth if you bypass accuracy.
“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,” Gerth writes in the afterword to his Russiagate post mortem. “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.””