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Last this AM, John talks to President and CEO of MediaPedia, Christine Czernejewski, about media bias, coverage of international conflicts, and the influence of independent journalism. Christine shares insights on how mainstream outlets distort facts, the rise of independent media figures, and the importance of local journalism.
Back on this Tuesday morning on the Read Revolution, I'm John Reed. Let's take a look at how some of the media is covering what is happening in Iran.
I mean, it's a horrible situation.
Caitlin Collins of CNN Surprise Surprise had this synopsis of how this whole thing got started.
Week since this war with Iran has been underway, the deadliest incident of civilian casualties was a strike that happened on an elementary school in southern Iran that killed scores of children.
Tonight, a CNN analysis of that attack reveals evidence suggesting that the United States military was likely responsible for it.
What you're about to see is disturbing. I want to warn you, the United States says it's still under investigation, but this was the scene at the school just after the strikes one week ago, nearly.
CNN has not independently confirmed the death toll, but Iranian health officials and state media believe that at least 168 children and 14 teachers were killed.
Our analysis, which is based on satellite imagery, geo-located videos and the assessment of munitions experts suggests that this school is hit around the same time that an attack that American forces had launched on a neighboring Iranian naval base.
This new satellite image shows several revolutionary guard buildings near the all-girl school. You can see how close they are. And red, you can see the craters at the center of the structures, including the school and what experts say look like precision strikes.
A wall marked by that dotted line there is all that separates the school in this base.
Okay. I don't know if that's true or not. You know, I lived in the Middle East and they lie constantly and they set their own people up for death because they then become martyrs and the reaction of their population is different than the reaction of our population.
We don't seek out and idolize death. And in the Middle East, there's a very different attitude.
Being a martyr is a great thing in their mind. It's hard for Westerners to understand that. But we have a siop, a psychological operation happening in our own backyard to try to soften up the resolve of the people of the United States.
Would we, if we went combed the CNN archives, would we see that they have been very concerned about the human rights abuses for 47 years that Iran has been responsible for?
Where's the two-minute story on that that indicates why maybe this is a good thing to get rid of the eye at all.
Christine Cherneyevsky is the President's CEO of Mediapedia. And Christine, I appreciate you joining us. What's your reaction when you see something like that from Caitlin Collins and other national reporters?
Yeah. Well, you're absolutely right. I think you put it very well that the public only gets one side of the story. And that is that they haven't seen the death and the destruction of the Iranian regime.
They hang their own people in city streets, but we don't see a lot of those images. And it's interesting how they've covered the Supreme Leader, the death of the Supreme Leader, Qwani.
Obituaries in both the New York Times and the Washington Post called him an avuncular figure. It's almost like they got on Snapchat and decided to use this euphemistic phrase for someone who murdered thousands of his own citizens.
And it does a real disservice to the American public when they're not seeing what the truth is, which is this regime has been deadly against its own people and has committed severe human rights abuses for decades.
You mentioned the obituary. And of course, there were those who threw up the obituary for Rush Limbaugh, which was not exactly polite or nice about Rush Limbaugh when he died.
Charlie Kirk's assassination, not exactly nice or cleaning up his reputation. And I think he was wrongly maligned wonder wonder why editors and writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post would use that language and could they back it up?
I mean, I'm unaware of videos of the Ayatollah handing out food to people or dressing up like Santa Claus and arriving at the school to be fun with the kids. I mean, there's just nothing about these individuals that I think would give them even the slightest, hey, you don't know the whole story about their personality.
And in fact, that's why they're the supreme religious leader of the country. Where does this come from? Why does nobody call it out, Christine?
Well, it just shows you, I think, how far left the extreme left has become that they're more likely to sympathize and prop up these aggressors in hot spots around the globe, then, then call it out for what it really is.
I think we've seen this in regimes around the globe and particularly in areas where things go under reported like we've seen in parts of Africa where, you know, Christians are persecuted and that doesn't really get the coverage that it deserves.
I think it comes from the Ivy League. That's where it starts where you've got these ultra liberal professors who I think live in an alternative reality and are so far removed from what's actually happening on the ground and the real lives that people live.
We've just seen this play out in the streets of New York City over the weekend where you've had people who were two different sets of protesters.
There's one who was anti-Muslim and the others who were pro-Muslim, but really the protest itself is what mattered.
It's the people who, the two teenagers who had these IEDs and threw them into the crowd of protesters. Now, the media coverage of that has been very chaotic, very confusing.
The focus should be on the two teenagers who basically tried to murder Americans.
And yet, it's kind of being covered like a regular crime story instead of an alarming possibility that we've got sleeper cells and newly radicalized individuals in our midst and maybe we should be alarmed about that.
I think they're very deliberately trying to insulate the normal reaction of the American public towards people who might be hostile to them.
It's an odd choice unless you have chosen sides here. And I'm used to people choosing America as the side they're going to be on if they have to make a choice.
You almost have to come to that conclusion because not only were they were barely even covering it as a crime, CNN just had a story that almost treated these two teenagers as if this was some sort of poetic thing that they were doing where they were.
I think the words they used were that they took the route to New York City that thousands take and they could have been spent the their day and doing an unusually warm afternoon, but instead an hour later, they found themselves arrested.
That is not how you should cover a terrorist incident whatsoever.
Now, about less than an hour ago, CNN just took that post down because they acknowledged that it didn't reflect the severity of the situation.
So the media coverage really does one conflate what's really going on, but two conflates it so that whatever the case, it's sympathetic to whatever the progressive far left cause is.
We're trying to call out at mediapedia.org, which is the organization that I run and we rate reporters based on their bias and time and time again, we're seeing that these legacy media outlets, no surprise, have reporters that all lean left.
You do not see any right leaning reporters and not even many reporters who are in the center that come from these organizations.
Are there are there any left? I mean, Laura Logan, I think she had a wake up call when she was sexually molested and abused in the Middle East.
And now she is kind of on her own because if I'm remembering correctly CBS got got rid of her, if I remember her, there was a parting of that alignment.
And a lot of these reporters, when they do have that epiphany or they reveal that they're not aligned with the left on everything, suddenly their contracts not renewed.
And they're really there only hope to the same level of fame and fortune that they were hoping for one of the big networks is to go to Fox News or perhaps to Newsmax or News Nation where there's a little bit of money and fame still involved in this.
Are you seeing the pattern that these people are purged?
I think a lot of them find they're so restricted at these organizations that they end up going off on their own doing their own podcasts, doing their own substacks sites.
We've seen journalists like Matt Taiibi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Schellenberger, and then podcast host like Megan Kelly who went off on their own.
And they've been able to exercise a lot of freedom and they can themselves share one, you know, where they lean on stories and be very transparent about it.
I know making Kelly yourself has said what her biases, which is great people know where she's coming from.
That's being honest what people don't like is when reporters lie about their ideological perspective, but pretend that they're in the center.
So, you know, as discouraging as it continues to be that corporate media is basically an extension of the Democratic Party.
Our media ecosystem is large and I think right for those who are independent and want to share perspectives that Americans don't get from corporate media.
It is interesting though, the money is the big thing, you know, Megan Kelly walked out of NBC when her show didn't do well at the today show with, I mean, just a huge, what was it, 30 million dollars or something crazy that she wound up as the golden parachute to leave when the show didn't do as well as they had hoped.
So, hey, I'd love to fail and get that kind of money and I like Megan Kelly, I'm not putting her down, Glenn Beck, same deal made a fortune at CNN and an even bigger fortune at Fox.
And fortunately, these people do seem to reinvest that money into endeavors that might amplify conservative expression and they've empowered other people.
Who else would you identify as a leader in that movement?
The podcast movement, I think, is just chock full of people who have gone out their own and found real freedom.
I know we, you know, we've mentioned Megan Kelly, but there's so many others and, you know, look at someone like Joe Rogan who has, I wouldn't call him a journalist, but he was able to appeal to a massive audience.
Because he tells what, you know, he feels is his, his perspective based on his life experiences. Again, that goes to authenticity, I think.
I think people who are good at that format, the podcast format and can do long, conform conversations and have compelling insights are poised to do very well and lucratively.
And I think also in the process are doing a great job for discourse in our country as well.
Maybe this is a bad question to ask you and you can pun if you want to, who's the worst?
Have you compiled that list and who, who you would rank as the most biased, the most bigoted anti conservative media figure out there?
Well, I certainly have my thoughts on who might fit that list. I do want to say just on behalf of media media, we are rating legacy reporters, we're starting, we're prioritizing those who claim to be center, but they're not.
And so we haven't gotten yet because we've, we've existed for about a year, we will rate others on the right on the left. So what I can say about corporate media figures, reporters is that they do lean left my own thoughts on the worst offenders are pretty much all of CNN.
At least though, at MS now, you know, you know that you're going to get a lot of, yeah, but it's, it's hard to watch them because they just are so, so progressive and in my mind often are making, just making things up.
Yeah, the, the leftist movement has found their mouthpieces and, and there's a lot of money behind it, which is the other thing that's really remarkable, the, the people we've referenced to Glenn back and, and Megan and to a certain extent, Joe Rogan, I mean, Joe Rogan was famous for a lot of other things before he started his podcast. It's almost like you have to hit a certain level of fame.
In order to transfer that over to have an audience where you can talk to those with an exception of somebody like Nick Shirley, who went out and broke this story in Minnesota about the leering center.
And, you know, a lot of people were paying attention to that type of, of journalism, which apparently everybody else in Minnesota just completely ignored and I suspect if they're ignoring a Minnesota, they're ignoring it a lot of other places.
As a former TV reporter in Richmond, I keep looking for someone who's an enterprising reporter to go, well, if they were doing in Minnesota, do we have leering centers in Richmond, do we have old folks homes that are getting, you know, Medicaid payments, but there's nobody in the, I, I haven't seen those stories. I'd be curious to know whether they're going to do it.
Anyway, old school, what we now would call old school reporting, what it used to be is, you know, you get the people who would go to the county courthouse, go to the county jail, talk to the sheriffs, go into neighborhoods, you know, what we would call the other shoe reporting.
We're really missing out on that in this day and age and that's the kind of reporting that Nick Shirley was doing clearly we're missing that clearly we need more of it.
You know, our hope should be that media outlets, you know, wake up to that fact that there's a lot to cover out there. There's a lot of potential, you know, fraud and government that clearly Nick Shirley exposed and part of that has to do with the fact that local media, the local media landscape has been completely decimated.
It's not the funding there anymore for local media the way there used to be and I think that, you know, if we can revitalize local media that we will get that type of reporting again.
It's interesting, Christine, there's one elected official in Virginia who used law fair to go after the person, the reporters that were investigating her.
Basically told them all I'm going to sue the hell out of you and the corporate entities all back down because they didn't want the lawsuit.
And I suspect we're one scratch away from discovering a great deal of corruption with this individual who's an elected official but nobody wants to touch it because they just the corporate people are not willing to fund the lawsuit to defend themselves.
You know, at this stage, I think it's probably hidden. It's really important to be critical, not just of elected officials, but the people who are covering them.
Are you are you covering them fairly or you being aggressive or not? I'll check out media media and I appreciate you joining us. Christine, thank you very much.
And so much for having me.
All right. Listen, we got to go. I am about to go out and give a speech on the gerrymandering plan, the illegal gerrymandering scheme that the Democrats are trying to jam down everybody's throats.
So I got to go a little earlier than we normally would, but I think this is really important to talk to people around the state.
And tomorrow morning, I'll be in northern Virginia because I've got remarks with a group of business leaders up in northern Virginia who, you know,
it's good. They're focused on their business. They're trying to grow their business. That's good for Virginia. It's good for them, but they need to be aware of this conniving plan that the Democrats have misled everybody on.
And you can vote now between now and April 21st. I would encourage you. Please to do your own research. Don't have trust me, but I would encourage you to do your own research. And then I am voting no on this.
I don't think this is right. I think it's a deliberate betrayal of representative democracy.
And there's nothing fair about this at all. The Democrats have broken the law. You know, what are to even bring this issue to the voters.
So vote no between now and April 21st. I'd encourage you to do some research. And I'll be speaking all over the state in the next few weeks between now and that election day to try to encourage people to pay attention.
And hopefully they'll reach the same conclusion that I have that this is a real betrayal of the people of the commonwealth of Virginia by our elected officials.
So we'll pick this up tomorrow morning on the read revolution. I hope you have a great Tuesday.
