Ep. 266 - The Real 'Person of the Year'
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
185.03552
Summary
Time named Jamal Khashoggi Person of the Year, and it was a big mistake. The mainstream media chose him as the person of the year because he was a liberal journalist who stood up to the Saudi regime and spoke out against them.
Transcript
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Time Magazine reports the fakest news of the year.
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Finally, a heartwarming moment at a Nashville airport
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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There are now people in power who see journalism as a threat.
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Freedom of the press starts at the local level.
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Jamal Khashoggi, and basically anyone who doesn't like Donald Trump.
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We will explain why the mainstream media continues to be distrusted,
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and why they are the most self-aggrandizing people on planet Earth.
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I woke up today and I knew it was going to be a fun show.
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You'll remember Jamal Khashoggi is the Islamist former Saudi insider
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who was brutally killed, truly brutally killed,
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And the mainstream media tried to paint this guy as a liberal Western democratic reformer journalist.
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And they made him the person of the year and all of the guardians,
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the most fictional group of people I've ever heard of in my life.
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The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country's government.
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He told the world the truth about its brutality toward those who would speak out.
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Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi's killing made it a sensation.
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Virtually nothing about that statement is true.
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He's a stout man with a gray goatee and a gentle demeanor.
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He was a defender and a member, certainly at one time and maybe for his entire life,
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He didn't just dare to disagree with his country's government.
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The Saudi government has been brutal, has been vicious, has murdered dissonance,
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has trampled on human rights for a very, very long time.
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And for most of the time that the Saudi government was doing it,
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It was only when a new faction of the Saudi regime came to power that he fell out of favor
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and the mainstream media painted him as this democratic reformer.
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There are photos of him holding assault rifles in Afghanistan
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when he was there with Osama bin Laden in the 80s.
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This is not a gentle guy who happened to finally blow the whistle on the excesses of his government.
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Everybody knows how awful the Saudi regime is and Jamal Khashoggi helped them in their excesses.
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He helped the regime until his side of the government fell out of power.
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And ironically, actually, the new side of the Saudi government, run by Mohammed bin Salman,
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is much more reforming, is much friendlier toward Western powers and Western interests.
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One of Jamal Khashoggi's major complaints against the Saudi regime was they were too nice to Israel.
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Jamal Khashoggi also blamed the United States for bringing 9-11 on itself.
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But Jamal Khashoggi, in the wake of 9-11, said,
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Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington
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with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine.
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That's the fictional country between Wakanda and Narnia.
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It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy
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But unfortunately, such rationalization is still not part of the American reality,
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saying this is the consequence of supporting Israel,
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is that Muslim terrorists fly planes into your buildings and kill 3,000 civilians.
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That's what Jamal Khashoggi said, the democratic, wonderful, reformer, American resident.
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Worth pointing out, he was officially a royal advisor.
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He traveled with King Abdullah, the previous king of the kingdom.
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He was very close with Prince Turkey al-Faisal.
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That's how we know that he very likely worked as a Saudi spy.
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In 2015, this all turned around because King Salman rose to power
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and Mohammed bin Salman became the heir apparent, the crown prince of the kingdom.
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Why has the mainstream media jumped to elevate this guy?
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Some people have accused me of defending the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
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It's awful to kill people in embassies and chop them up while they're alive.
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What I'm saying is when you play around with awful regimes,
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when you support Islamist movements throughout the Middle East and radical Islamism,
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when you weep over the death of Osama bin Laden,
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you're known by the friends you keep and bad things might happen to you.
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So why is the mainstream media defending him so much?
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In part, this is just a side war in defending Barack Obama and attacking Donald Trump.
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Donald Trump is protecting our alliance with Saudi Arabia as a power that is contrary to Iran.
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Donald Trump is standing by the Saudis as a stave against Iranian hegemony in the region.
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So that's a little bit of what's going on with the mainstream media.
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Now, the Time magazine article doesn't get everything wrong.
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Her name is Maria Ressler, who is a journalist in the Philippines covering the Duterte regime.
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And the Capitol newspaper, you'll remember, they had those five staffers gunned down in June.
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But even covering this, which is, you know, it was such an awful shooting that happened there.
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Time magazine is covering it to attack Donald Trump.
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Quote, in Annapolis, Maryland, staff of the Capitol, a newspaper published by Capital Gazette Communications,
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which traces its history of telling readers about the events in Maryland to before the American Revolution,
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press on without the five colleagues gunned down in their newsroom on June 28th.
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Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting,
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are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines,
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What Time magazine is doing here is accusing Republicans of being responsible for the shooting in Maryland,
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And even their line that trust of American news outlets has broken down on partisan lines isn't true.
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The majority of Americans, Democrats, independents, and Republicans, distrust the mainstream media.
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That is just as fake news as calling Jamal Khashoggi a Western liberal reformer journalist
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Two reporters for Reuters in Myanmar were thrown in jail for documenting the deaths of Rohingya people there.
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Bangladeshi photographer was jailed for 100 days for criticizing the prime minister.
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is they mix in real journalists who are actually being persecuted for shedding light on corrupt governments.
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They're mixing that in with fake news stories to attack Donald Trump,
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to try to pretend that a Bangladeshi photographer being thrown in jail for criticizing the prime minister
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is the same thing as Jim Acosta grandstanding and not giving up the microphone
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and not letting other reporters ask questions, losing his press pass for five minutes.
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And they're trying to compare a Saudi spy insider Islamist
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who wants the whole Middle East to be run by an Islamic theocracy
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They're trying to make him seem like some wonderful Western journalist.
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He's out there, you know, working the beat for the Washington Post.
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You know, if Time Magazine really wanted to put journalists up front,
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which they can, especially international journalists
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Lead with those guys, but they don't lead with them.
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They lead with Donald Trump and Jamal Khashoggi.
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Obviously, the mainstream media have a very overinflated view of themselves.
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The other takeaway is that the only unifying theme right now on the left
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They can't pick some activist or some politician
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or some businessman who would be person of the year.
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All they can do is take the opponent of Donald Trump,
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And then what it shows is this obliviousness of the mainstream media.
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According to Axios SurveyMonkey, the majority of Americans believe,
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they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading.
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of the presidency to attack the media every day.
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It goes back to before Barack Obama was the president.
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66% of Americans thought the newspapers were fair.