Media is the Message - MSNBC Had List of Democratic Candidates Who Were Blacklisted

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Former MSNBC producer claims her show had blacklist that included Andrew Yang & ‘several other’ candidates

23 Nov, 2020 00:33 

FILE PHOTO: Former Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang

© REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Former MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary has claimed that she was told by the bosses not to interview former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang and “several others” as the race for the nomination was heating up.

Pekary, who left the liberal cable news network in August, dropped the bombshell about her former employer’s alleged election bias in a series of tweets on Sunday, after Yang teased her appearance on his podcast.

“Actually, I just reviewed my journal. On 4/25/19, I was told that we were never to pursue Andrew for an interview on our show (along with several others),” Pekary tweeted, adding that the names of welcome and unwelcome guests were “dictated” from above without any explanation given.

The list of candidates was dictated, but the reasons for allowing them or not were not explained

The same day Pekary claimed she was given the message Joe Biden announced his run for presidency.

I'm sure that was just a coincidence! Pfft!

Pekary further explained that she couldn't speak for the whole network, saying that “the list was unique to The Last Word" (The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell show) and, presumably, did not come from MSNBC’s higher-ups.

Falling short of disclosing other names on the approved list of guests, Pekary said that she was “somewhat surprised” as to who had made it and who turned out to be personae non gratae.

“And looking back, I’m somewhat surprised by the list - who was in, who was out (“somewhat” but not entirely). Some “friends” of the show were out, others were in," she tweeted.

Pekary’s admission has sparked a guessing game as to who else might have been barred from appearing on the show, and whether the same rules applied to the network as a whole.

“Are you legally bound around this stuff, or can you post a bunch of screenshots for us?” one asked.

“Do you know if other shows on MSNBC had similar lists? Was it common to not invite presidential contenders on the network?” another tweeted. 

Yang, who now works for CNN as a political commentator, appeared to be taken aback by the revelation.

While the show or the network itself has yet to comment on Pekary’s claim, it’s not the first time the cable channel faces accusations of muting non-mainstream political voices.

Late newsman Ed Schultz, who worked for MSNBC before joining RT America, claimed in a 2018 interview that he was barred from covering Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid announcement five minutes before he was to come on air. Schultz said that he received a last-minute call from then-president of the network, Phil Griffin, who told him he was not “covering this.”

MSNBC’s sister channel, CNBC, raised eyebrows earlier this year after they replaced Yang’s face with that of a similarly-named businessman, and the face of another Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard with that of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand during their segment on election fundraising. The channel eventually apologized for the mistake.

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'Manipulative BULLS**T': Glenn Greenwald defends calling NBC a CIA mouthpiece, mocks accusation of 'endangering journalists'

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© Reuters / Brendan McDermid

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald torched accusations that he endangered reporters by saying NBC News spouts CIA propaganda, saying he only spoke of a well-known fact, and the effort to shame him was "manipulative bulls**t."

"Profoundly sorry for endangering the lives of NBC executives and TV personalities by spilling the extremely well-kept secret of their close working relationship with the CIA," Greenwald tweeted sarcastically on Saturday. His message showed a picture of a headline about NBC's 2018 hiring of ex-CIA chief John Brennan as an NBC and MSNBC contributor.

Greenwald's retort came in reply to reporter Sulome Anderson, who accused him of endangering journalists who work in places where any CIA affiliation is "life-threatening." Greenwald earlier this week said NBC "has always existed to disseminate US government, CIA and corporate propaganda."

"This crosses a line," Anderson said. "Like some of his proteges, Glenn is endangering journalists working in perilous environments by telling his massive following that they are mouthpieces for US intelligence."

Greenwald said on Saturday that NBC has a "long-standing role" in spouting CIA propaganda, as evidenced by its hiring of Ken Dilanian, who was accused of sharing stories with the CIA press office prior to publication while working as a Los Angeles Times reporter. NBC also helped the CIA sell the Iraq War on its Meet the Press program, and sister network MSNBC was "ground zero for mindless CIA stenography of the most unhinged Russiagate conspiracy theories," he said.

"NBC has always existed to disseminate US government,

CIA and corporate propaganda."

"If you don't want to be known as a CIA outpost, then don't be one," Greenwald tweeted. He added that NBC hired "John Brennan, Ken Dilanian and every other operative puked up by the security state. People already know."

Anderson has written at least two opinion pieces on Lebanon for NBC in recent months. She has been critical of Hezbollah, designated a terrorist group by the US government, but also has interviewed some of its fighters.

Anderson, who said she is "morally opposed" to journalists working as intelligence agents, may have good reason for her sensitivity about alleged CIA ties. Her parents were both journalists who covered Lebanon's 15-year civil war, and she said her father was kidnapped by terrorists. "They tortured him again and again for years, calling him CIA," she said Saturday on Twitter. "'I am not a spy,' he would scream. 'I am a reporter.' It never stopped them."

It would appear that Hezbollah has known of the connection for a very long time. Are you accusing Greenwald of telling them something they didn't know?

Anderson acknowledged journalists being used as intelligence-agency assets, but said such cases are rare. "Time and again, American hostages – journalists and otherwise – have been falsely called spies, tortured and killed," she said. "I have been in many situations where I've had to convince the very dangerous men I am with that I am not a spy. My saving grace has always been that I am not."

Greenwald came to international fame by breaking the Edward Snowden NSA whistleblower story in 2013. He later co-founded the Intercept but quit the outlet last month after saying editors there suppressed his coverage of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.

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NBC Reveals It Sat on Discrediting Info About Kavanaugh ‘Witness’

Mainstream Media are astonished at how little credibility they have in the public eye. Here is one of many examples why. They seem to be coming every day.

© Reuters/ Joshua Roberts

As the US Justice Department prepares to investigate media-hound attorney Michael Avenatti and Kavanaugh "victim" Julie Swetnick for making false accusations, NBC admitted they knew Swetnick's story was falling apart weeks ago.

More than three weeks after an NBC interview where Kavanaugh accuser #3 Julie Swetnick contradicted the sworn affidavit she gave Avenatti, the network is publishing text and phone exchanges with a supporting “witness.” 

Recorded around the time of Swetnick's interview, the second woman appears to tell two different stories when Avenatti is around and when he isn't.

The supposed witness signed an affidavit, made public by Avenatti on October 3, describing in no uncertain terms how she saw a young Brett Kavanaugh (now a US Supreme Court justice) spike the drinks of girls at student parties so that they could then be gang-raped. 

When questioned by NBC, however, she said she hadn't actually witnessed it, and Avenatti had grossly misrepresented her words in the document she had only "skimmed" before signing.

NBC then spoke to Avenatti, who had provided the second woman's contact information in the first place, to try to straighten out the stories, but the plot only thickened. The hot-tempered lawyer expressed his "disgust" with the outlet and at one point said "on background, it's not the same woman. What are you going to do with that?"

They then reached out to the "witness" again, and she backed Avenatti and the affidavit – only to insist in a phone call minutes later that she never saw Kavanaugh do anything and she wouldn't speak to Avenatti anymore.

Swetnick's own early-October interview to NBC revealed a story that markedly diverged from her written narrative. Questioned on camera, she could no longer be certain that Kavanaugh was among the boys who supposedly gang-raped her, or that he had spiked the punch at the party. 

It later emerged during the FBI investigation into her claims that Swetnick had a history of making false accusations of sexual misconduct.

Earlier this week, Judiciary Committee chair Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) referred Avenatti and Swetnick to the Justice Department to be investigated for conspiracy to defraud, making false statements to federal officials, and obstructing a federal investigation.

One would think perhaps NBC should be investigated as well. News is so blatantly political in America, and yet they accept no responsibility for the deep division in the country. 

A Deafening Media Silence on the Obama-Hezbollah Scandal

By David Harsanyi, AP, New York Times

Politico published a jaw-dropping, meticulously sourced investigative piece this week detailing how the Obama administration had secretly undermined US law enforcement agency efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah. The effort was part of a wider push by the administration to placate Iran and ensure the signing of the nuclear deal.

Now swap out “Trump” for “Obama” and “Russia” for “Iran” and imagine the eruption these revelations would generate. Because, by any conceivable journalistic standard, this scandal should’ve triggered widespread coverage and been plastered on front pages across the country. By any historic standard, the scandal should elicit outrage regarding the corrosion of governing norms from pundits and editorial boards.

Yet, as it turns out, there’s an exceptionally good chance most of your neighbors and colleagues haven’t heard anything about it.

Days after the news broke, in fact, neither NBC News, ABC News nor CBS News — whose shows can boast a collective 20 million viewers — had been able to find the time to relay the story to its sizeable audiences. Other than Fox News, cable news largely ignored the revelations as well.

Most major newspapers, which have been sanctimoniously patting themselves on the back for the past year, couldn’t shoehorn into their pages a story about potential collusion between the former president and a terror-supporting state.

Perhaps if President Trump had tweeted about the story, outlets would’ve squeezed something in.

Even when outlets did decide to cover the story, they typically framed it as a he-said/she-said. “Politico Reporter Says Obama Administration ‘Derailed’ Hezbollah Investigation,” reads the NPR headline. Did Josh Meyer of Politico say something about Obama or did he publish a 14,000-word, diligently sourced, document-heavy investigative piece? If you get your news from NPR, you’d never know.

Fact is, the Drug Enforcement Agency began its classified investigation (called Project Cassandra) into Hezbollah in 2008. It found that the Iranian proxy had laundered nearly a half a billion dollars and was moving cocaine to the United States. According to Politico, the Obama administration not only threw obstructions in front of investigators but failed to prosecute major players in the enterprise.

What makes the media blackout particularly shameful is that the story isn’t a partisan hit job. It was written by a well-regarded journalist at a major outlet. The story has two on-the-record sources — which is more than we can say for the vast majority of so-called scoops about the Russian “collusion” investigation. One of these sources, David Asher, was an illicit finance expert at the Pentagon who was tapped to run the investigation. There’s no plausible reason to ignore him or the story.

Then again, ignoring or diminishing Obama’s shady dealings with Iran isn’t new. Obama administration officials bragged to the New York Times Magazine last year that they’d created an echo chamber, relying on the ignorance, inexperience and partisan dispositions of reporters to convey their lies to the American people.

We saw this when the Obama administration claimed it was releasing 14 Iranian civilians on humanitarian grounds, when in fact it was releasing spies and weapons dealers. Or when Team Obama claimed diplomacy had won US hostages’ release, when it fact it had sent hundreds of millions of euros, Swiss francs and other currencies on wooden pallets in unmarked planes to Iran. The press was uninterested in those stories, too.

“Journalism is about covering important stories.

With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

Establishment media personalities will often point out that none of us would have any knowledge of these incidents if not for their reporting. This is true. There are intrepid journalists at media institutions who aren’t swayed by partisan considerations.

The preponderance of editors, journalists, pundits and bookers, on the other hand, still coddle Democrats. They may do it on purpose or unconsciously, but it’s destroying their credibility. Because as David Burge once noted, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist.