Ep. 73 - Keaton Jones: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Did you see that viral video yesterday of the little boy crying about being bullied, and the heartwarming, outpouring of support for him on social media? Yeah, you saw that? Well, it’s ruined. We’ll analyze why our culture of insta-fame and slacktivism means we can’t have nice things. Then, Erielle Davidson, and Amber Athey join the Panel of Deplorables to talk Jimmy Kimmel’s slanderous exploitation of his own son, Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s smacking around fake news, and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s calling her Senate colleague Kirsten Gillibrand a slut.
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Did you see that viral video yesterday of the little boy crying about being bullied and the heartwarming outpouring of support for him on social media?
Yeah, you saw that.
It was so nice.
Well, it's ruined.
We will analyze why our culture of insta-fame and slacktivism means that we just can't have nice things.
Then, Ariel Davidson and Amber Athey joined the panel of deplorables to talk Jimmy Kimmel's slanderous exploitation of his own son.
A lot of children being exploited today.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders smacking around fake news.
And Senator Elizabeth Warren, Laya Wath, is calling her Senate colleague, Kirsten Gillibrand, a slut.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
That was a real fast news cycle yesterday.
You saw this little kid, Keaton Jones.
This video goes viral.
But the Insta culture has now taken what used to be 15 minutes of fame.
It is now 15 seconds of fame before we love somebody and then we just have to destroy that person and move on to the next whatever it is.
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Okay, let's get into news.
For those of you who didn't see it, this is Keaton Jones and the viral video that we all saw yesterday.
Why do they boys?
Why do you find joy in taking innocent people and finding a way to be mean to them?
It's not okay.
Now, this is, on the one hand, it's heartbreaking to watch this little kid crying about being Obviously, there's something, I think, in all of us that just hates bullies.
Bullies are just the worst.
We feel righteous anger toward them.
Sometimes people don't understand when they're being the ones being bullied.
So all these people on the left are saying, yeah, stand up to bullies.
And By the way, if you don't want to do exactly what I say, I'm going to shut down your business, or I'm going to shut down your cake shop, or I'm going to shut down your florist shop.
But it's heartbreaking.
It's heartwarming.
It's not exactly man bites dog.
You know, kids get bullied all the time.
That's a fact of elementary school and middle school.
It isn't going to change, I don't think.
But okay, that's fine.
It's very nice.
As a result of this video going viral, every single celebrity on earth, I believe, responded to offer support.
So SnoopDiggityDoodap tweeted, Say little man, you got a friend in me for life.
Hit me on DM so we can chop it up.
Love is the only way to beat hate.
Very nice.
The UFC says, Hey Keaton Jones, you have friends here at the UFC, buddy.
Today and always stand with Keaton.
Then Donald J. Trump Jr.
said, This boy is incredibly brave and the video really got me.
Dana White, if he takes you up on your offer to see UFC headquarters, I would be honored to host him and his family at our place if they need somewhere to stay.
Chris Evans, stay strong, Keaton.
Don't let them make you turn cold.
I promise it gets better.
While those punks at your school are deciding what kind of people they want to be, how would you and your mom like to come to the Avengers premiere in L.A. next year?
That's pretty nice.
That sounds pretty good.
Katy Perry says, this broke my heart today.
Please be kind to one another.
Mark Ruffalo, little buddy, I was bullied as a kid.
You're right.
It gets better.
You are my personal superhero.
You got a pal in the Hulk.
Monica Lewinsky said, Keaton, I'm so sorry you're being treated this way.
You don't deserve an ounce of pain.
They'd be lucky to be friends with you.
It gets better.
I'm not going to make any jokes about that.
Obviously, there are many.
Ryan Seacrest said, Keaton Jones, your curiosity and kindness will overcome this moment and bring you joy.
Many better days to come.
Enrique Iglesias.
Heartbreaking to see this.
Keaton, you're strong to say these things and care so much for others.
Team Keaton.
I can't go on.
Obviously, that was a lot.
There were hundreds more.
There were so many of these.
It was a little strange that every single person With a blue checkmark started tweeting.
I sent out a little tweet about being bullied.
I think everybody feels some empathy for this because everyone gets bullied and most people bully too.
And that's just a fact of being in elementary school and middle school.
We have seen this viral culture before.
It looks like it's accelerating though.
Someone started a GoFundMe campaign.
That's where you crowdfund, you raise money online.
They started a GoFundMe for this kid.
It raised $55,000.
For what?
What are they raising the money for?
I don't know.
What is a kid going to spend $55,000 on?
He's like nine years old or something.
But they fund it because we just feel bad for the kid.
What can I do?
I can give him money.
I can click.
I can hashtag.
That's all that we can do.
I don't even know if the kid's going to get money.
I don't think the guy is connected to his family.
So anyway, it's a little weird, but it's clearly self-indulgent.
Whatever.
It's nice.
Who cares?
But of course we had to destroy it.
We had to destroy this poor kid.
So they found a photo.
All of these internet people found a photo of Keaton's mother standing next to a Confederate flag.
One or two photos of this.
He's a kid from Tennessee.
There are Confederate flags around.
So the left pounced.
Tariq Nasheed...
I actually couldn't see this tweet because he blocked me.
One time I tweeted his own words at him and he blocked me for it.
But I did see this in news coverage.
Tariq Nasheed...
Who I'm not convinced isn't just a right-wing troll, by the way.
But anyway, prominent lefty Tariq Nasheed says, that viral video of Keaton Jones talking about being bullied is heartbreaking, and I feel sympathetic toward that child.
But his mom, Kimberly, on the other hand, is a suspected racist who makes very problematic posts bullying black protesters.
She didn't make problematic posts.
She was standing next to a Confederate flag.
People interpret that however they like.
But she wasn't bullying people.
I don't know what it means to be a suspected racist.
You're under investigation.
Bob Mueller has been appointed to see if you're really a racist.
It doesn't mean a whole lot.
But anyway, more lefties pounced on this.
It is the brutal consequence of social media culture and slacktivism.
We just need more clicks.
So, you know, when you post something on Facebook or Twitter, you do get a dopamine rush.
You think, oh, will people like this?
Ooh, I got a like.
Great.
Ooh, I'll get another one.
I'll get another retweet.
And those highs and those lows have to go more quickly and more quickly, and they have to be more extreme and more extreme.
So what used to be a very long news cycle has now become a 24-hour news cycle, has now become an eight-hour news cycle, and it all switches over.
It cuts both ways, too.
The mother exploited her child and put him on the internet and made him go viral.
And people are now exploiting this child further because we have to talk about it.
It's a cultural event.
It's a sympathetic story, but then we need a villain.
We need somebody to tear down.
The story was too nice without it.
They did this to Ken Bone.
I don't know if you remember Ken Bone.
Back during the 2016 presidential debates, there was a nice-looking man in a red sweater with a mustache, and he became an Insta celebrity.
Here's Ken Bone.
What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?
So he became a meme because he just looks sort of silly.
He looks like a cartoon character.
So they really liked him.
He's so respectful during the debate.
He asked a serious question.
He looked hopeful.
And so anyway, he became insta-famous after he appeared on television with the candidates.
But it was too nice.
We can't have that.
That cycle gets old after a day or two.
So now we have to make him into a villain.
Someone on Reddit found out that he had committed two egregious crimes.
One, he had looked at the widely published naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence.
And I think that makes him the only man in America to ever look at the completely ubiquitous nude photos of one of the most beautiful and famous celebrities in the world.
It's really off.
It's unbelievable that they would let that man back out in public.
So he did that, and also he posted something on Reddit and said that perhaps it wasn't murder for George Zimmerman to kill Trayvon Martin.
Perhaps it was in self-defense.
Some of the evidence showed that.
Perfectly reasonable, and so he became a villain, and his reputation was destroyed just as quickly as his fame came about.
Former Facebook executives have been admitting just this effect.
This came out today.
Former Facebook Vice President for User Growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, I'm sure I butchered that, said he feels, quote, He went on, quote, This is a global problem.
It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.
Facebook's founding president, Sean Parker, criticized the company the same way.
He said it, quote, To discuss that and much more, we will have to bring on our panel of deplorables.
But, First, before we bring on our panel, don't forget our third episode of The Conversation is coming today at 5 p.m.
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Okay, now to our panel.
We have from The Federalist, Ariel Davidson, and we have from The Daily Caller, Amber Athey, an all-female panel of deplorables.
Thank you, Lord.
Ariel, social media allows conservatives to crack the mainstream media monopoly on information and get their views out there.
Isn't that a good thing?
I would think so, yes.
But I think what happens is social media tends to turn people into keyboard warriors, and so I think that there is a sense of Boldness that can sometimes be helpful, but more often than not can be extremely inflammatory.
So I think there is a give and take when it comes to social media.
It's definitely been a way for people to exit their bubble, but it's also been a way for people to reinforce their bubble.
You know, now that you can share your block lists on Twitter, or you can also just on Facebook choose to friend someone or choose to unfriend them based on the material they post, I think it does sort of reinforce Our perception of a worldview, which is why, you know, when Donald Trump was elected, there was sort of a collective meltdown on the left.
And I think a lot of that was because social media had created this false sense of where political opinions lie in the world, you know, and that can be somewhat dangerous.
So I think in some ways, social media can do more harm than good, especially when it's used to sort of bolster, again, these keyboard warriors and people that take to Facebook and There is that aspect.
the unfriending phenomenon is really strange to me.
There have been a number of studies that show that people on the left are much more likely to unfriend or disconnect from you on social media if you're a conservative than vice versa, then conservatives doing it to lefties.
And I think the reason for that is because lefties have never heard anybody contradict their opinions.
They preach tolerance and diversity and they're shocked to find out that anybody disagrees with them.
But for the other aspect of that is that We're more than our political opinions.
People are more than our political opinions.
So if you sit and have dinner with somebody and you find out they voted for crooked Hillary, that dirty rotten felon, and my third cousin, if I saw that on Facebook, I might just ignore that person or look away or unfriend them or something.
But in person, you have to talk to them, and it might be interesting.
Different perspectives make the world much more beautiful.
They may Make the world more interesting.
And they help you think about what you really believe.
A lot of that kind of disappears on social media.
That said, CNN would not give me a show.
CNN is never going to give me a show.
And if these new media didn't exist, we wouldn't have a platform.
Now, Amber, if social media have made our culture faster, more knee-jerk, more hysterical, is there any way back from here?
Or are we just headed for even tighter news cycles?
Oh gosh, that's a really hard question.
I don't see it really getting that much better.
I hate to be a pessimist, but the more that I've been on social media, it seems like the more angry people get, the more political they get.
I remember being on Facebook back in high school and it was just about sharing prom pictures and posting cat gifs.
And now it's like everybody is sharing a political opinion.
It's all about getting those imaginary points From your friends or your followers, everybody on Twitter is seeing who is the next person that I can drag, and then within 24 hours, they're on to the next evil villain, like we saw in the Keaton case.
So it's definitely really dangerous.
I think it's great that more people have a platform to express themselves in ways that they couldn't before, but as Ariel was saying, At the same time, it can really bolster sort of a almost bullying where people are constantly able to attack anybody that they want at any time, and it really piles on when there's so many other people who are there to join in on the crusade.
And it's obviously been formulated.
It's been meticulously arranged, these technology, so that you will keep going back and you'll keep clicking and you'll keep tweeting and you'll keep piling on whoever.
That aspect on psychology is probably not very healthy, but the effect on politics seems to be quite healthy.
Could you imagine a world...
In which we had an administration like President Trump's.
Excellent conservative policy, legislation, nominations, cultural battles from the NFL to political correctness to the news media.
Could you ever imagine that without Twitter?
Donald Trump's appeal, his great strength is with Twitter.
It may be the case that it has bad psychological effects, but politically, I'm not sick and tired of winning yet.
I'm not.
Try to convince me that I am.
Won't happen.
Okay, we have more shameless exploitation of children to get to with Jimmy Kimmel.
We've got to talk about the slut-shaming shaming, the slut-slut-shaming, I don't know, one of those, between Lya Watha and Kirsten Gillibrand.
But if you don't subscribe to The Daily Wire, we can't make that happen.
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If you go to dailywire.com right now, you can subscribe.
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And...
You will get me.
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You can submit questions to the conversation.
Forget all of that.
None of that matters.
This is the thing, guys.
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You can have them hot or cold, always salty and delicious.
We'll be right back.
Speaking of the shameless exploitation of children, here is Jimmy Kimmel parading his sick son around to make an inaccurate political point. here is Jimmy Kimmel parading his sick son around to Okay.
They each gave a full day of their very busy lives to give me time off, and I'm grateful to them for doing that.
And, um...
Daddy cries on TV, but Billy doesn't.
It's unbelievable.
I don't know what could be more disgusting than putting a tax cut that mostly goes to rich people ahead of the lives of children.
Why hasn't CHIP been funded already?
If these were potato chips they were taking away from us, we would be marching on Washington with pitchforks and spears right now.
When was the last time that Jimmy Kimmel didn't cry during a comedy monologue?
Do we remember?
Was that like 2008 or something?
Every day now, it seems, he's constantly shoving his politics down our throat.
Amber, whatever happened to Johnny Carson or Jay Leno?
Are entertainers forcing their politics down our throats because they're hacks, or is it because we now demand politics in our entertainment?
I think it's a bit of both, actually.
I think, in many ways, Donald Trump has sort of brought the politics out of people who would normally be nonpolitical because, as a lot of these people say, Donald Trump is just the worst thing to happen to America ever, so we all have to share our political views now because we're in this unprecedented state of politics.
At the same time, though, we do have to remember that we probably wouldn't be talking about Jimmy Kimmel's show if he weren't parading his son around on stage in this disgusting manner.
So it has been helping their views to some extent.
He's gotten a disgusting amount of YouTube views and all these clips of him crying about health care.
And it's kind of easy Hollywood friendship and political points for them to be constantly attacking Republicans and Donald Trump.
You're absolutely right.
We would not talk about Jimmy Kimmel.
He hasn't been funny in a while.
He used to be sort of funny, and now he's become this political hack, so he's got to up the ante, turn it up to 11, and literally parade his sick son all over television so that we will talk about him.
The premise of his tirade is wrong.
CHIP is funded.
It will continue to be funded.
Republicans voted to fund it last week.
The Children's Health Insurance Program will be funded.
Does it matter that the premise is complete nonsense?
Does it matter to his audience or to the political discourse?
Well, it's interesting because Democrats actually were the ones that voted against doing the funding, if I remember correctly, because they were upset about where Republicans wanted to get the funding from.
So, in my mind, this is Not even just incorrect, it's actually humanizing the wrong party.
So if you want to, you know, throw daggers, you're throwing daggers at the Democrats in this situation.
But regardless, I think that the issue I have is sort of this form of grandstanding that's been taking place.
And you kind of, we've talked about this in prior podcasts, but there's sort of a sense of notoriety and fame that's now become associated with I don't know how long that gravy train is going to last, but that seems to be sort of the prerogative of a lot of entertainers who see their ratings falling.
And that can also apply to both entertainers and politicians, at least as we've seen.
I think I tend to fall in the camp that a lot of Jeff Blake's sort of trying to reinvigorate his popularity is through Condemning Trump.
But anyway, we can talk about that another time.
But I do think that this is, like Amber said, it's highly inappropriate, but does go to show that people appreciate, or maybe they don't appreciate, everything's become politicized now.
I would say it's not even, I think it's the politics hysteria.
And I think that there are a lot of people who feel like they know everything they need to know by just watching Jimmy Kimmel or John Oliver and seeing, you know, 140 character tweets.
Understanding the process of CHIP and how funding gets approved, it takes a little bit more effort.
I just don't see that taking place in our soundbite-driven social media.
It doesn't fit into 140 characters.
It doesn't fit into 280 characters.
CHIP is a federal program.
Federal programs require funding from Certain places and the way that that legislation is made is like the way that sausage is made.
But how many of these people who are harping on it, how many people like Jimmy Kimmel could explain to you what CHIP is, how it became a federal program, where the funding comes from, how the funding is spent and how much money is wasted?
It seems to me very few of them.
Right.
Well, I think there's an element, like I said, I think hysteria is what drives a lot of the political dialogue, and especially coming from the Democrats, it's a politics of fear.
You know, how many times did we hear with the tax bill that millions are going to die?
How many did we hear when, you know, Republicans were advocating for repealing the individual mandate from Obamacare?
How many times did we hear the Democrats say millions are going to die?
I mean, this is their Classic response to nearly every policy decision.
What makes Jimmy Kimmel's situation different is that he's presenting a position that didn't exist on the GOP side.
So he's still saying that GOP decisions, basically no matter what the GOP does, millions are going to die.
That's pretty much...
No, that's because Trump is literally Hitler.
That makes sense.
There's a perfect parallelism.
Makes sense to me.
We have to move on to my favorite story of the day.
I woke up to this story.
I just popped right out of bed.
I was so happy to see it.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Chief Lia Watha, responded to a Trump tweet by calling her Democrat Senate colleague Kirsten Gillibrand a slut.
So Donald Trump first tweeted, quote, Very disloyal to Bill and crooked.
Used!
I didn't say crooked Hillary anymore, just crooked.
They were billing crooked.
And so Senator Warren decided to respond by calling her colleague a slut.
So she responded, quote, are you really trying to bully, intimidate, and slut shame, Senator Gillibrand?
Do you know who you're picking a fight with?
Good luck with that, Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
So it's on that response is unbelievable.
But Ariel first, is it fair to say the premise of Senator Liawatha Focahontas is tweet is that Donald Trump called Kirsten Gillibrand a slut.
Did he do that?
He didn't.
He just suggested that she's willing to do anything to get campaign donations.
Now, if you interpret that as a sexual innuendo, that's on you.
I think Donald Trump has gone after many different people along the same lines of saying that they're eager and they're begging for donations.
So that's not unusual for Donald Trump.
I think that, again, this sort of appeals to the mass hysteria.
What's more disturbing to me is that Elizabeth Warren is suggesting her colleague is a slut.
And that Trump is shaming her for it.
How dare he?
How dare anyone shame you for being a slut?
I don't think Elizabeth Warren knows what slut shaming means.
I was surprised to see that that's the word she chose to use to sort of capture Donald Trump's criticism.
But Amber, you've probably been following this more on Twitter than I have, but it's been to be ludicrous, the responses.
Well, it's amazing the reaction because Donald Trump knows what he's doing.
He knows what he—especially with these tweets.
He is the poet of tweeting.
He is the William Shakespeare of tweeting.
So he knows when he says something, she would do anything.
He knows how the left is going to respond.
Now, obviously, saying that you will prioritize, that a Democrat or a politician will prioritize donors over the American people and constituents, that's the oldest political attack there is.
Donald Trump rode that line of attack all the way to the White House.
He said, I can't be bought by everybody.
Everybody else is bought and paid for by donors.
But he knew that they would respond that way, and they can't resist from doing it.
They have to put their heads right in the gutter, and then he can stand there and say, what's the matter with you?
I'm saying a typical, timeless political insult, and you're bringing it right back to sex, you dirty mainstream media perverts.
Now, Amber, Liz Warren alleged that he called Gillibrand a slut.
But she didn't attack him for calling her a slut.
She attacked him for suggesting that it's bad to be a slut.
Has the sexual revolution advanced so much that the left can no longer take offense at being called a slut?
You simply have to accept that premise and then say that that's not a bad thing.
Well, yeah, it's so strange the way that she chose to attack the Trump tweet.
A normal person, if they really thought that Trump was making some kind of sexual innuendo, I would imagine they would throw up their hands and they would say, how dare you accuse my colleague of wanting to use sexual favors to get campaign contributions?
She would never do that.
That's disgusting.
It's unethical.
Instead, Elizabeth Warren's response was that even if Senator Gillibrand had done that, then shame on you for criticizing her.
It's not that she would never do that.
It's that even if she did, you're wrong for calling her a slut for doing it.
It's so absurd.
I mean, if that really is the case that she did that, and I don't even think that's what Trump was implying because he's used the same language about Senator Ted Cruz, for example.
Well, he said to Mitt Romney.
He said Mitt Romney came begging for my endorsement.
I could have told him to get on his knees.
Was he sexually harassing Romney?
Apparently so.
It's so funny that, you know, even if that's what Trump was implying, for them to take issue with the fact that he was calling her a slut rather than that he was accusing her of doing something unethical is just indicative of How politically correct the left is.
And Elizabeth Warren's clearly trying to play into the young millennial, slut walk, modern feminism ploy, where women are allowed to do whatever they want and they can't be criticized for it because you're just slut shaming or being sexist.
So I think this is just another example of her trying to get ready for 2020, trying to get those young people in her base.
That's exactly Well, shame is very much under attack right now.
People don't like shame, probably because our culture is decadent.
And I'm not complaining.
Decadent cultures are a lot of fun.
But shame is getting short shrift here.
Isn't there a place for shame in society, in self-discipline, in the way that you live your own life?
Doesn't it serve an edifying role at times?
It actually plays a very important role in society.
Shame is sort of how we depend on internal shame and both external shame to regulate our own behavior.
And that's something even, like, behavioral psychologists will tell you.
Whether it be in a business setting, like a professional setting, or whether it be on, like, personal, you know, person-to-person basis.
Shame is what prevents us from hurting those around us and from making decisions that are best for our own interests.
And so when it comes to kind of what Amber was alluding to, we're going to see a lot more of this sort of permitting, you know, behavior or preventing anyone from engaging in self-evaluation, especially from the left, because you have a lot of figures who tend to be on the older especially from the left, because you have a lot of figures who tend to be on the older end of the And they're really trying to appeal to those young leftist voters.
And this is a way for them to sort of show their progressive chops.
We're not going to be judgmental like the establishment Democrats.
You know, we're going to be free-loving and more free-spirited and you do you and there's no real element of...
Don't yuck my yum, man.
Mm-hmm.
There's a really big hypocrisy to it too, because these are the same people who are using public shame to rid politics and the media of all of these sexual harassers.
It's the same exact tactic, yet they don't want to apply it inward.
Well, this is the irony of cultural relativism is at the same people who are saying that no culture is better than any other culture and all cultures are the same.
And how dare you assert cultural superiority are the same ones who are claiming that there's a rape culture on college campuses.
If no culture is better than any other, why should we worry about a rape culture?
They can't answer that because obviously we all know that certain cultures are better than others and we wouldn't choose a rape culture if that were a reality.
It really, it harshes their mellow and it makes them get all judgy, you know?
You know what I mean, man?
Absolutely.
All right, we have to move on.
I need to get a little judgmental on the fake news media because we have another fake news roundup today.
We did a whole episode on fake news, but then one of my favorite fiction novelists, Chris Silliza, and the Will Ferrell impersonator, Jim Acosta, have really given us a great performance today.
Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders smacking around Jim Acosta, star of Anchorman.
I would just say, Sarah, that journalists make honest mistakes, and that doesn't make them fake news.
But the question that I have...
But when journalists make honest mistakes, they should own up to them.
Sometimes, and a lot of times you don't.
But there's a difference.
There's a very big...
I'm sorry.
I'm not finished.
There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people, something that happens regularly.
You can't say, I'm not done.
You cannot say...
You cannot say that it's an honest mistake when you're purposely putting out information that you know to be false, or when you're taking information that hasn't been validated, that hasn't been offered any credibility, and that has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance.
This is something that...
I'm speaking about the number of reports that have taken place over the last couple of weeks.
I'm simply stating that there should be a certain level of responsibility in that process.
So what Sarah Huckabee Sanders said there, by the way, is 100% true.
Now, you might take issue, you say, well, we don't have evidence that they're intentionally cooking up stories.
But just to point out her diction there, she said either if they're cooking up stories or if they're running stories recklessly without vetting their information.
Because of that or, her statement is 100% true.
And by the way, there's plenty of evidence that they're just cooking up stories and intentionally pushing them.
This didn't stop CNN's Chris Salisa from running this headline today.
Sarah Sanders just made a hugely offensive allegation against the media.
Now, it might be offensive, but it's true.
The reality is offensive to the news media because they're publishing fake stories.
There have been three major screw-ups from the media, three major retractions in just the last three days.
Chris Silliza, I love that he's the guy to run this story today, because he ran another story before the election, which was titled, quote, Donald Trump's chances of winning are approaching zero.
That's Chris Silliza, who says, how dare you say that we get stories wrong or we recklessly run stories without corroborating evidence?
Now...
Amber, the mainstream media have been exposed as hacks and liars and lying hacks.
Is there any way for them to recover their credibility from here?
Oh man, it's going to be really, really hard because they just keep digging the hole even deeper.
They don't stop.
No, they don't.
CNN, of course, had that botched report on Friday about Don Jr.
and WikiLeaks where they got the date of an email wrong.
The only thing about that report, by the way, the only thing that was wrong about that report was every single thing that they said about it.
But other than that, the story was pretty accurate, I think.
Yeah, and they talked to two different sources, supposedly independently, who both gave them the wrong date.
I mean, it's incredibly hard to believe.
I'm pretty sure what happened here is that the reporters at CNN basically had their own biases about alleged collusion between Trump and Russia confirmed.
So they ended up running with the story, even though they didn't even see a physical copy of the email or have independent verification of such.
By the way, do you know what I think about that story?
I think this is my conspiracy hat on, so I'll put on the tinfoil hat.
But having worked on some campaigns before, I would not be surprised at all if it was a Republican who leaked that info to CNN, knowing that CNN wouldn't vet the information, knowing that they would recklessly run with it because it confirmed their biases.
We know that the Trump administration did this to Rachel Maddow over those tax returns.
I wouldn't be surprised.
And if so, excellent job because you totally exposed CNN for doing it.
It's just hard for me to believe that Democrats could be that incompetent to leak information with a completely wrong date on it.
But if it was a dirty trick, well done.
a wonderful political trick to expose those hacks at CNN.
Ariel, some of the degradation of journalism has been driven by demand.
So we want more opinion in our reporting.
We don't just want the facts.
Facts are boring.
The clicks go to saucy headlines and opinion journalism.
That guy, Dave Weigel, who posted that completely fake story about Trump's crowd size, he was hired to provide facts and opinion and analysis and whatever.
They know that they drive this.
Is the way forward more opinion or should the news media be sacrificing some views to get less biased coverage or more balanced coverage?
Well, my answer to this is always pretty firm in the sense that if you really have a strong opinion and you don't think you are capable of producing a report on an event without that opinion impacting your report, Then you should be an opinion journalist.
You should write for a political journal that has a particular given slant.
There are people that have slants and they know this about themselves.
And so as a result of that, they, you know, they join, they become political journalists with a particular slant and they join that given publication.
My issue is that there are plenty of wonderful journalists out there who work extra, extra hard.
In fact, I know them and I'm close friends with them that work extra, extra hard to make sure their opinion doesn't infiltrate their work.
However, those people end up being in the minority.
What I've seen from mainstream outlets is that we have too many journalists who are taking for granted now.
They see themselves as sort of what I understand as moral arbiters.
They see themselves as firefighters.
They see themselves as part of the resistance.
And so everything they do In pursuit of resisting Trump is somehow morally good.
And so, in that sense, they put their resistance to Trump and their resistance to the GOP agenda as the number one priority as opposed to reporting absolute fact.
What Sarah Huckabee Sanders said was not necessarily incorrect because the line between reckless reporting and intentional misinformation is there, but it's very slim and it's also often blurred, right?
If you're driving at extremely high speeds and an accident occurs, Are you no longer responsible?
Same goes for plagiarism.
Amber can probably speak because she works directly in the industry.
There are harsh penalties for plagiarism.
And sometimes it's not even intentional, but the punishment is still the same.
Because, and that sort of goes, when I think about how we punish or how we respond to misinformation, yes, there are genuine mistakes, but the result of misinformation, whether it's intentional or just a matter of carelessness, the result is still the same.
You still spread false information.
And I know the way to punish it.
I know my favorite way to punish it, which is to just keep ridiculing them.
We showed this clip yesterday from CNN where it looks like journalism.
And for so long we thought it was journalism.
We thought it was news.
The guy's wearing the nice tie and his hair is combed.
They're speaking seriously.
They're probably wearing these glasses.
Seems like a serious conversation, but it's not news.
It's just fabricated nonsense and partisan hackery.
And I'm more than happy to keep ridiculing it.
Bring it on, baby.
It is I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
