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Seven Shades of Stenography: Disinfo Outlets Dutifully Rebroadcast Corrupt GOP Attacks on Banks [1]

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Date: 2022-10-21

On Wednesday, the Infowars Investors from the offices of 19 states' Attorneys General sent letters to six major banks, pressing them on their involvement with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and their Environmental, Social and Governance practices (to prevent investing in the dirtiest, most racist and corrupt companies).

This latest step in the Alex Jonesian assault on companies behaving semi-decently, is ramping up the rhetoric, alleging a banking conspiracy, and is getting just about as close as elected Republicans can, to out-right claiming Jewish bankers are secretly running the world.

But of course that's not how rightwing media covered it! No, instead they basically just copied and pasted the press release into their respective publishing softwares, and uploaded. Churning press releases into "journalism", AKA churnalism.

The Federalist was explicit that its story was "according to a press release " from Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, before basically just copying and pasting the entire thing, while the Washington Times piece at least pretended to do journalism and noted that the banks all "declined" or "have not responded to requests for comment."

Trevor Schakohl, a "legal reporter" at the Daily Caller, on the other hand, based his coverage on releases from Republican Attorneys General from Arizona and Texas. Sort of. Schakohl linked to the Texas release when quoting Arizona AG Mark Brnovich, so while we also found the Arizona press release , the particular quote from him the Caller uses isn't actually there, so who knows where they got it from.

Oh wait, we do! It looks to be a botched paraphrase of the Missouri AG Eric Schmitt's statement, so it doesn't appear to be a quote from Brnovich — or anyone else for that matter — at all!

Here's the Daily Caller, note the second sentence in particular: “NZBA is an agreement between major banking institutions to support the climate agenda by choosing not to work with companies engaged in fossil fuel-related activities,” Brnovich said . “This means some farmers, oil leasing companies, and other businesses will be unable to get a loan because of the alliance.”

Now read Missouri AG Schmitt's press release: “The Net-Zero Banking Alliance is a massive worldwide agreement by major banking institutions, overseen by the U.N., to starve companies engaged in fossil fuel-related activities of credit on national and international markets. Missouri farmers, oil leasing companies, and other businesses that are vital to Missouri’s and America’s economy will be unable to get a loan because of this alliance,” said Attorney General Schmitt." [bolding in original]

It's press release churnalism, and the Daily Caller still messes it up! And not for lack of experience with the concept- ever since 2015 we've been calling Michael Bastasch a churnalist for running disinfo press releases as " news ", and now he's the Managing Editor at the Daily Caller , but apparently he still can't manage to edit things well. (That's what happens when you hire a Koch-trained propagandist to do a journalist's job!)

Anyway, if you're wondering about the larger effort to make capitalism even more racist, polluting, sexist and corrupt by fighting ESG standards, worry not! Wil Hild, of the newly-billionaire-backed group Consumers Research ( covered recently by the New York Times) was quoted in a bunch of outlets with a reputation for spreading conservative disinformation.

Breitbart , PJMedia , Epoch Times all ran a quote from him, as did the Daily Wire , which described both Wild's quotes and the Missouri AG's quotes, whose press release they turned into "news," as "a statement provided to The Daily Wire," which is technically true, but also about the most desperate and self-inflating way to say "they sent us a press release we copy-pasted-published."

But hey! At least they didn't screw up the copypaste and attribute an edited quote to the wrong Attorney General!

The Daily Caller: terrible, even among awful competition!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/21/2130340/-Seven-Shades-of-Stenography-Disinfo-Outlets-Dutifully-Rebroadcast-Corrupt-GOP-Attacks-on-Banks

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