When we think of Mainstream Media MAGA Assassins, names that leap to mind are Rachel Maddow, Morning Joe & Mika, Brian Stelter, Chris Hayes, Joyless Joy Reid-- faces frothing in unhinged rage, vying to see who can verbally rid the earth of you in under 30 seconds.
While yelling into cameras provides catharsis for the yellers ("Whew! got that out of me!") and dopamine for the pews ("Amen! Preach, brother!), commentators do little to move the needle.
Just because you are browbeating doesn’t mean you are convincing anyone other than the chosen few.
Much more lethal than the carnival barkers are those who inject poison into the national bloodstream under the guise of delivering news.
Word for word, and across the most categories, Erin Burnett at CNN has done the most of any journalist to tilt sentiment against the Deplorables, and public policy toward atrocity.
It is for this reason that we are awarding Erin Burnett and the staff behind the scenes at Erin Burnett OutFront the 2021 Malwords Weekly MSM Assassin of the Year Award— before the year is even out. Because they are so far out front there is not enough space or time for anyone else to catch up.
It’s a recognition long overdue. Burnett has been hosting OutFront on CNN in the 7PM time slot since coming over from CNBC in 2011. Burnett’s background in finance and investigative reporting give her the confidence and gravitas for diving into the controversial issues of the day. But really what got out attention was her statistics, which are compelling across the board.
Let’s take a few minutes to explain the metrics for our Media MAGA Assassins ratings because it’s important that you appreciate this woman’s achievement, and throwing out a bunch of numbers without context is not the way to do it.
We’ll boil it down to the basics of human conflict:
When a fight is about to break out, you immediately know from both body and verbal language—death stares, clenched fists, widened stances, raised voices, increased profanity— that adversaries are about to come to blows.
And as the indicators of conflict escalate in both volume and frequency, you can typically predict when the first punch is going to be thrown.
Mass behavior preceding conflict follows similar patterns. And why wouldn’t it? We are, after all, we are dealing with the same raw material— people. Watch any footage of clashing demonstrations, and the same escalation presents itself.
Between organizations, we also see escalation, but in protocol that recalls the quaint, self-conscious formality of gentlemen’s duels—lawsuits domestically and declarations of war internationally.
But one escalation that until just recently has been cloaked in mystery—and a great deal of fascination— is how governments declare war on their own people, usually upon a minority or subset of their citizens or subjects.
Government-sponsored atrocity is domestic terror which perpetrators and abettors in every instance (except one, which took place in the United States eighty years ago) go to extraordinary lengths to bury and cover over the grave(s).
And until the advent of Big Data, in the grave is pretty much where these atrocities have stayed.
But while the guilty may have escaped(?) to their just reward in the sky, leaving their names safely redacted back on earth, one thing they never could have foreseen was the advent of data science.
And how the science— like chattering fingers and shifting feet— betrays an uncanny correlation between government-sanctioned atrocities and the frequency of heavily weighted keywords in the news corpora (body of published words) in the months, weeks, and days leading up to these atrocities.
As the mineable body of news data has grown, we are seeing these patterns repeating themselves in a measurable phenomenon we call malwords.
Malwords are keywords weaponized for information warfare. In and of themselves they are harmless, but in a given context they are lethal.
Not a year ago “January 6” indicated nothing more than a date. Today, it invokes an alleged attempt by Trump supporters to overthrow the US government
Not a year ago, “Unvaccinated” was nothing more than a Scrabble term. Today it describes mouth-breathing science deniers whose ignorance threatens to kill us all with a virus from which there is a 97-99% recovery rate.
Not a year ago, “misinformation” was a Soviet-era term used to describe anyone criticizing the government. Today it is the single biggest health threat to the United States per the Surgeon General.
Not a year ago, “Arizona audit” would not have shown up in a Google search. Today it describes a harebrained attempt by Trump extremists to undermine democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of a duly elected President.
Malwords are mental malware, verbal viruses designed to spread quickly for the purpose of silencing dissent by control of language, narrative, and speech. Seeded appropriately into a news narrative, they can tilt the national dialogue against a targeted subset of the populace by
Softening up the public to look the other way when their neighbors are destroyed and disappeared and
Emboldening elected and appointed officials to do things for which they would normally lack spine.
Malword frequencies are expressed in parts per million (PPM), the number of times per million published words we can expect to see them. Keep in mind that the average person processes approximately 20,000-30,000 words over the course of a day, so if a particular malword shows up in the the news corpus at a frequency of over 50 PPM, chances of hearing that term at least once in your daily consumption of news is pretty good.
And it is here that Erin Burnett and her team at OutFront have led the way, with PPM rankings in the top five for
Unvaccinated: #1 Overall (#1 in Broadcast) at 19.44 PPM
Misinformation: #1 Overall (#1 in Broadcast) at 18.15 PPM
Arizona Audit: #4 Overall (#1 in Broadcast) at 18 PPM
January 6: #5 Overall (#3 in Broadcast media) at 10.6 PPM
But the most astounding accomplishment of Erin Burnett and the OutFront team at CNN is the #1 Total Malword Count of 208.04 PPM piled up in just nine months of 2021. The secret to this success is the industry’s highest concentration of anti-MAGA articles at 11.64%. Distant #2 is Wolf Blitzer in Situation Room at 8.44%.
Clearly these are numbers without peer. Not only that, they have helped embolden both Federal and local governments to take action to criminalize, incarcerate, cancel, those who dare oppose policies with little to no basis in actual science.
Her hand— and her employer’s— in the growing frequency and boldness of atrocities being carried out against Americans of conscience make Erin Burnett the undisputed Malwords Weekly 2021 MSM Assassin of the Year. And for that we congratulate her and the entire Erin Burnett OutFront team
You are probably never going to meet Erin Burnett in real life. She lives in New York City, pulls down $6 million a year. And with a power hubby at Citigroup, she can well afford to stay safe and secure above the hot struggles of the real poor whose lives have been crushed by those who haven’t had to do without a paycheck.
But check out this list (scroll all the way down) of her producers and uncredited flaks on IMDB
Chances are you may know and/or run into them. Like you they also have bills to pay, kids to school, commutes to make, appearances to keep up, and even may be willing to listen to how you feel about their working for a news program that targets you for social, physical and financial disappearance.
If not, we are sure they will be more than happy to engage and instruct you in the errors of your ways.
Deplorables, know your place: respect your rulers; bow to your betters.
It’s the new American way!