Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Who owns the media seems like a simple and straightforward question that can be answered with a brief search, corporate registration papers and ownership records. Or so you might think. The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it comes to the media, the question of ownership is about more than who legally owns it. Last year, Bezos decided to change course at the paper which had adopted its infamous “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline amid a promise to bring down Trump as a sequel to Watergate. After eight years in which the paper managed to do little more than settle out of court after libeling a high school kid as a racist, subscriptions by the true believers were declining. Hoping to reboot the paper, Bezos brought in Will Lewis, formerly of the UK’s Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal, who in turn tried to bring in The Telegraph‘s Rob...

In 2017, the Voice of America attacked President Trump's travel ban on Muslim terrorist countries. What the VOA did not tell viewers was that its 'reporter' was a former Jihadist. In the 1980s, Masood Farivar, an Afghan Muslim, now a senior analyst at the government’s Voice of America media organization, had joined Jihadist groups in Afghanistan whose members included Taliban leaders and which had worked with Al Qaeda. Farivar’s Jihadi comrades included Awal Gul: the Taliban commander locked up in Gitmo after being paid $100,000 by Bin Laden to help him escape. Farivar has since mourned Awal Gul wondering "how many other Awalguls languish in Gitmo." But over the last eight years, Farivar had a new enemy, cranking out dozens of articles for the VOA with titles like, "Can Trump Be Indicted for Obstruction of Justice?", "Has Trump Done Enough to Fence Off His Business Interests?" and "Hush Money Troubles for Trump?" The only thing more ...

Over the last twenty years, the media, an institution that had defined American politics in the twentieth century, began a decline that has wiped out its influence, its finances and its future. Ask anyone in the media what happened and they will blame the internet, social media, disinformation, echo chambers and other tired buzzwords directing the fault elsewhere. The reality is that the media killed itself. The media lost its influence because it believed so much in that influence that it became convinced that it was no longer subject to the gravity of public opinion, but defined public opinion, at exactly the time when its future was most at risk and its influence was most in doubt. It wasn’t the internet, but the media’s reaction to it that put it on its current pathway to oblivion. Rather than responding to the increasing competition resulting from a low barrier to entry by maximizing its appeal, the media radicalized until it could only appeal to niche audiences. The media compla...

“The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline,” former New York Times editor Jill Abramson claimed. “Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.” How could the media have possibly penetrated that “veil of secrecy” when Biden confused Iran and Ukraine during the State of the Union address in front of the entire nation, when he falsely claimed that his son died in Iraq, couldn’t remember in an interview when he had served as vice president, and finished a speech with “God save the Queen.” There’s no way the estimated 85,000 reporters in the country could have cracked this case. The 60% of Americans who said they weren’t confident about Biden’s mental capacity had somehow penetrated the “massive cover-up” that no one in the media seemed able to do. Where are Watergate’s Woodward and Bernstein when you need them? Bob Woodward popped ...

Mornings in Northeastern Pennsylvania start on WILK-FM with ‘The Bob Cordaro Show’ described as “convincingly conservative, lovingly logical, proudly and passionately patriotic and reliably right”. And then eventually other conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, come on the air. But that may be about to change. WILK is one of a number of Pennsylvania stations owned by Audacy (five in Philadelphia alone), the second largest radio broadcaster in America and it, along with over 200 radio stations across the country, is about to fall into the hands of George Soros in time for the 2024 election.. After Audacy was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Soros Fund Management bought hundreds of millions of its debt for 50 cents on the dollar and under a bankruptcy agreement will become its largest shareholder with a potential impact on much of the country and its politics. Audacy claims to be able to reach 200 million people across the range of its properties which include sports, music and...

The Associated Press revealed last year that it had scored $8 million to promote claims of global warming. The AP impartially described this massive conflict of interest as an illustration of “how philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism”. “This far-reaching initiative will transform how we cover the climate story,” its executive editor claimed. That is no doubt true. And an incredibly damaging admission. The philanthropic quid-pro-quo saw five organizations fund the AP’s dedicated team of “more than two dozen journalists” to cover “climate issues” that the wire service would then plant in papers around the country to terrify Americans into supporting ‘green’ taxes and subsidies. The Associated Press did not bother to explain to its readers or the newspapers that run its stories why these organizations were impelled to throw millions at it except sheer benevolence. Nor did it explain why they might be particularly interested in convincing American...

Broke-ness follows wokeness because it’s invariably the incompetent, lazy, corrupt and otherwise failed institutions that radicalize to avoid doing their jobs. From the federal government to corporate monopolies to financial gimmicks like FTX to the media to massive charities, institutional wokeness is a red flag that an organization is incompetent or a scam. As a rule of thumb, the less innovative and functional an organization is, the more likely it is to disguise its innate worthlessness through virtue signaling. Executives go woke when they have no idea how to move a company forward. Employees who don’t want to do their jobs descend into identity politics and demand that the company reflect their values. Those values, apart from all the right racial and sexual politics, will eventually come down to not doing their jobs. The top generals and admirals in the military have gone woke because they have no idea how to win wars anymore. And there are fewer consequences for declaring a ‘wa...

  I’m worried. “Is ‘rainbow fentanyl’ a threat to your kids this Halloween? Experts say no,” NPR assures me. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in these past few years it’s to believe the opposite of what experts say. The media has given up trying to get people to trust it and now asks it to trust its handpicked experts. And those experts say the same exact things that the media says. Every subject is now tackled by experts. Do you think that a Senate candidate who can barely grasp a sentence is worrisome? “Fetterman’s use of captions is common in stroke recovery, experts say,” the  Washington Post  wheedles. Experts tend to say that Democrats should be elected and Republicans shouldn’t be. They agree that when a Democrat does something it’s very different than when a Republican does it. And if you think the experts are biased, the experts will say that they’re not. Q.E.D. Experts warn of the rise of “misinformation”. And misinformation has come to be defined by peopl...