title: Media bias in the United States

text: In a 1977 "Rolling Stone" magazine article, "The CIA and the Media," reporter Carl Bernstein wrote that by 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles oversaw the media network, which had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. Its usual "modus operandi" was to place reports, developed from CIA-provided intelligence, with cooperating or unwitting reporters. Those reports would be repeated or cited by the recipient reporters and would then, in turn, be cited throughout the media wire services. These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American-big-business and anti-Soviet views, such as William S. Paley (CBS), Henry Luce ("Time" and "Life"), Arthur Hays Sulzberger ("The New York Times"), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of "The Washington Post"), Jerry O'Leary ("The Washington Star"), Hal Hendrix ("Miami News"), Barry Bingham, Sr. ("Louisville Courier-Journal"), James S. Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison ("The Christian Science Monitor").


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Five corporate conglomerates (Comcast, Disney, Fox Corporation, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery) own the majority of mass media outlets in the United States. Such a uniformity of ownership means that stories which are critical of these corporations may often be underplayed in the media. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled this handful of corporations to expand their power, and according to Howard Zinn, such mergers "enabled tighter control of information." Chris Hedges argues that corporate media control "of nearly everything we read, watch or hear" is an aspect of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: "The guard dog metaphor suggests that media perform as a sentry not for the community as a whole, but for groups having sufficient power and influence to create and control their own security systems." The Guard Dog Theory states that, "the view of media as part of a power oligarchy".


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Academics such as McKay, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Hudson (see below) have described private U.S. media outlets as profit-driven. For the private media, profits are dependent on viewing figures, regardless of whether the viewers found the programs adequate or outstanding. The strong profit-making incentive of the American media leads them to seek a simplified format and uncontroversial position which will be adequate for the largest possible audience. The market mechanism only rewards media outlets based on the number of viewers who watch those outlets, not by how informed the viewers are, how good the analysis is, or how impressed the viewers are by that analysis.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to some, the profit-driven quest for high numbers of viewers, rather than high quality for viewers, has resulted in a slide from serious news and analysis to entertainment, sometimes called infotainment:


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Kathleen Hall Jamieson claimed in her book "The Interplay of Influence: News, Advertising, Politics, and the Internet" that most television news stories are made to fit into one of five categories:


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Reducing news to the five categories and tending towards an unrealistic black-and-white mentality, simplifies the world into easily understood opposites. According to Jamieson, the media provides an oversimplified skeleton of information that is more easily commercialized.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Media imperialism is a critical theory regarding the perceived effects of globalization on the world's media, which is often seen as dominated by American media and culture. It is closely tied to the similar theory of cultural imperialism.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Significant writers and thinkers in the area include Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: The political activist and one-time presidential candidate Jesse Jackson said in 1985 that the news media portray black people as "less intelligent than we are." "The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy", a book published by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman, claimed to document bias in media coverage of scientific findings regarding race and intelligence. Snyderman and Rothman stated that media reports often erroneously reported that most experts believe that the genetic contribution to IQ is absolute or that most experts believe that genetics plays no role at all.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to Michelle Alexander in her book "The New Jim Crow" in 1986, many stories of the crack crisis broke out in the media. In the stories, African Americans were featured as "crack whores." The deaths of the NBA player Len Bias and the NFL player Don Rogers from cocaine overdose only added to the media frenzy. Alexander claimed in her book, "Between October 1988 and October 1989, "The Washington Post" alone ran 1,565 stories about the 'drug scourge.'"


title: Media bias in the United States

text: One example of this double standard is the comparison of the deaths of Michael Brown and Dillon Taylor. On August 9, 2014, news broke out that Brown, a young unarmed black man, was shot and killed by a white policeman. The story spread throughout news media, which explained that the incident had to do with race. Only two days later, Taylor, another young unarmed man, was shot and killed by a policeman. That story, however, did not get as highly publicized as Brown's. Taylor was white and Hispanic, but the police officer was black.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Research has shown that African Americans are over-represented in news reports on crime and that in the stories, they are more likely to be shown as the perpetrators of the crime than as the persons reacting to or suffering from it.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A 2017 report by Travis L. Dixon (of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) found that major media outlets tended to portray black families as dysfunctional and dependent, and white families were portrayed as stable. The portrayals may give the impression that poverty and welfare are primarily black issues. According to Dixon, that can reduce public support for social safety programs and lead to stricter welfare requirements. A 2018 study found that media portrayals of Muslims were substantially more negative than for other religious groups, even after relevant factors were controlled for. A 2019 study described media portrayals of minority women in crime news stories as based on "outdated and harmful stereotypes."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Another example of racial bias was the portrayal of African Americans in the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. The media presented the riots as being an African American problem and deemed African Americans solely responsible for the riots. However, according to reports, only 36% of those arrested during the riots were African Americans; 60% of the rioters and looters were Hispanics and whites.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Conversely, multiple commentators and newspaper articles have cited examples of the national media underreporting interracial hate crimes when they involve white victims, unlike when they involve black victims. Jon Ham, a vice president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, wrote that "local officials and editors often claim that mentioning the black-on-white nature of the event might inflame passion, but they never have those same qualms when it's white-on-black."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to David Niven, of Ohio State University, research shows that mainstream American media show bias on only two issues: race and gender equality.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In a research conducted by Seong-Jae Min that tested racial bias in stories of missing children in the media, African American children were less represented between 2005 and 2007. According to the US Department of Justice, out of 800,000 yearly cases, 47% were "racial minorities" and were underreported. According to Dixon and Linz, the news media often reports cases where children of color are criminals but often report cases of white children being victims of crime.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to 2010 report, gender reporting is biased, with negative stories about women being more likely to make the news. Positive stories about men are more often reported than positive stories about women. However, according to Hartley, young girls are seen as youthful and therefore more "newsworthy."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: The 1996 Summer Olympic Games showcased gender bias, with male athletes receiving more television coverage than female athletes in the major event.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Numerous books and studies have addressed the question of political bias in the American media. Various broadcast and online outlets exhibit both liberal and conservative bias. Commentary, editorial and opinion is more biased than factual news reporting in the mainstream media, and concerns have been raised as the lines between commentary and journalism are increasingly blurred. In reaction to this, there has been a growth of independent fact-checking and algorithms to assess bias.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative, was the first Republican to allege liberal media bias during his 1964 presidential campaign. According to the "Encyclopædia Britannica", "conservative media critics often claim that U.S. media skews toward the political left".


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to a study by Lars Willnat and David H. Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana University, conducted via online interviews with 1,080 reporters between August and December 2013, 38.8% of US journalists identify as "leaning left" (28.1% identify as Democrats), 12.9% identify as "leaning right" (7.1% as Republicans), and 43.8% as "middle of the road" (50.2% as independents). The report noted that the fraction of Democrat journals in 2013 was the lowest since 1971, and down 8 percentage points since 2002; the trend is for more journalists to be politically non-aligned. The study also noted "The emergence of the problem of “fake news" and propaganda that is made possible by the dark underbelly of the digital age has combined with the Trump-driven hostility toward journalists to make the focus of this article even more timely."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: An October 2017 Pew Research report found that 62% of stories involving US Republican President Donald Trump during his first 60 days in office had a negative assessment, compared to only 5% of stories with a positive assessment. By comparison, the study found that Democratic President Barack Obama received far more favorable coverage in his first 60 days in office; 42% of stories involving Obama during that period were identified as positive, and only 20% were identified as negative. A May 2017 study from Harvard University's Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy of Trump's first 100 days in office also identified a similar negative tone in coverage. The study found that 93% of CNN and NBC coverage of President Trump during the period was negative. The survey also found 91% of CBS coverage was negative and that 87% of "The New York Times" coverage was negative during Trump's first 100 days. For reference, the Kennedy School reported that the "Financial Times" of London, was also negative in 84% of articles over the same period, and the BBC was negative 74% of the time. Even Fox News, whose stated aim is to be conservative, was more negative of Trump than positive (52% to 48%).


title: Media bias in the United States

text: An October 2018 Rasmussen Reports poll of 1,000 likely voters found 45% of Americans believed that when most reporters write about a congressional race, they are trying to help the Democratic candidate. Alternatively, only 11% believed that most reporters aimed to help Republican candidates.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A 2020 study in "Science Advances" found that, although a majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats, there is no evidence of a liberal media bias in which stories journalists chose to cover in their reporting.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A 2021 research paper published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that American conservatives believe "that the American press blames, shames and ostracizes conservatives," citing media coverage of COVID-19 and Donald Trump, but that they were "not primarily upset that the media get facts wrong, nor even that journalists push a liberal policy agenda,".


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Perceived liberal bias was cited by Roger Ailes as a reason for setting up Fox News. From the late 20th century, a right-wing media ecosystem grew up in parallel to mainstream journalism, leading to an asymmetric polarization in conservative media. Whilst there has been research into "The Wall Street Journal" editorial page's adopting more conservative perspectives on economics since Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the company, its news reporting is part of the journalistic mainstream and is committed primarily to factual reporting. New right-leaning media outlets, including Breitbart News, NewsMax, and WorldNetDaily have instead a core mission to promote a conservative or right-wing agenda, often (unlike "The Wall Street Journal" and other mainstream conservative journals) supporting a hierarchy based on race, religion, nationality, or gender. Analysis of social media shares in the 2016 election cycle shows that consumers of conservative media are much less likely than consumers of partisan liberal media to share mainstream sources, leading to an echo chamber effect with high insularity and drifting towards extremes. Mainstream and left-leaning media imposes reputational costs on those who propagate rumor and coalescences around corrected narratives, the conservative media ecosystem creates positive feedback for bias-confirming statements as a central feature of its normal operation.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Research finds that Fox News increases Republican votes and makes Republican politicians more partisan. A 2007 study, using the introduction of Fox News into local markets (1996–2000) as an instrumental variable, found that in the 2000 presidential election, "Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News, which suggests that "Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure." The results were confirmed by a 2015 study. A 2014 study, using the same instrumental variable, found congressional "representatives become less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast." Another 2014 paper found that Fox News viewing increased Republican vote shares among voters who identified as Republican or independent. A 2017 study, using channel positions as an instrumental variable, found "Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Kenneth Tomlinson, while chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, commissioned a $10,000 government study into Bill Moyers' PBS program, "NOW". The results of the study indicated that there was no particular bias on PBS. Tomlinson chose to reject the results of the study, subsequently reducing time and funding for "NOW" with Bill Moyers, which Tomlinson regarded as a "left-wing" program, and then expanded a show hosted by Fox News correspondent Tucker Carlson. Some board members stated that his actions were politically motivated. Himself a frequent target of claims of bias (in this case, conservative bias), Tomlinson resigned from the CPB board on November 4, 2005. Regarding the claims of a left-wing bias, Moyers asserted in a "Broadcasting & Cable" interview that "If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to former Fox News producer Charlie Reina, unlike the AP, CBS News, or ABC News, Fox News's editorial policy is set from the top down in the form of a daily memo: "[F]requently, Reina says, it also contains hints, suggestions and directives on how to slant the day's news—invariably, he said in 2003, in a way that was consistent with the politics and desires of the Bush administration." Fox News responded by denouncing Reina as a "disgruntled employee" with "an ax to grind." Andrew Sullivan wrote of Fox that "[o]ne alleged news network fed its audience a diet of lies, while contributing financially to the party that benefited from those lies." A similar top-down approach to dictating messaging is used at Sinclair Broadcast Group, which notably instructed all its local news anchors to run a conservative message in the main news segment. Its rapid growth through station group acquisitions—especially during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential elections—had provided an increasingly large platform promoting conservative views.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Nexstar Media Group, the US's largest owner of local television stations, specifically claimed to counter perceived cable news media bias by starting the NewsNation channel to replace the struggling general entertainment channel WGN America. Nexstar invested millions of dollars into news programming, and said they hired "rhetoricians" to monitor language used in their flagship newscast, "NewsNation Prime", for evidence of bias. However, ratings were lower than the entertainment programming it replaced, the channel's interview with President Donald Trump was mocked by other outlets as being especially soft, and later it was disclosed that former Fox News Channel chief and Trump administration deputy chief of staff Bill Shine was brought on as a consultant. After the disclosure, the news director, managing editor, and vice president of news all resigned within one month, just as NewsNation was expanding its hours of coverage.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In "Network Propaganda", Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society use network analysis to analyze American media and explore why there is "often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage [...] and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right". By tracking citations and social media shares across various news outlets and correlating with editorial political leaning, they found that right-wing media sources had effectively segregated themselves into in an increasingly isolated silo, creating a propaganda feedback loop continually becoming more extreme and more partisan. They note that the right wing media "punish actors – be they media outlets or politicians and pundits – who insist on speaking truths that are inconsistent with partisan frames and narratives dominant within the ecosystem", and contrast this with a "reality check dynamic" that prevails in the mainstream media. They also note that liberal readers consume a much broader range of sources, whereas right wing media consumers rarely stray outside of the narrow right wing bubble.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has argued that accusations of liberal media bias are part of a conservative strategy, noting an article in the August 20, 1992 "Washington Post", in which Republican party chair Rich Bond compared journalists to referees in a sporting match. "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time." A 1998 study from FAIR found that journalists are "mostly centrist in their political orientation"; 30% considered themselves to the left on social issues compared with 9% on the right, while 11% considered themselves to the left on economic issues compared with 19% on the right. The report argued that since journalists considered themselves to be centrists, "perhaps this is why an earlier survey found that they tended to vote for Bill Clinton in large numbers." FAIR uses this study to support the claim that media bias is propagated down from the management and that individual journalists are relatively neutral in their work.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News" (2003), Eric Alterman also disputes the belief in liberal media bias, and suggests that over-correcting for this belief resulted in the opposite.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Tech companies and social media sites have been accused of censorship by some conservative groups, although there is little or no evidence to support these claims.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: At least one conservative theme, that of climate change denialism, is over-represented in the media, and some scientists have argued that media outlets have not done enough to combat false information. In November 2013, Nathan Allen, a PhD chemist and moderator on Reddit's science forum published an op-ed that argued that newspaper editors should refrain from publishing articles from people who deny the scientific consensus on climate change.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Conservatives have argued that Facebook and Twitter temporarily limiting the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy on their platforms, even though parts of the story later turned out to be accurate, "proves Big Tech's bias".


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Claims of shadow banning of conservative social media accounts (manipulating algorithms to minimise the exposure and spread of specific content) were brought to the fore in 2016 when conservative news sites lashed out after a report from an unnamed Facebook employee on May 7 alleged that contractors for the social media giant were told to minimize links to their sites in its "trending news" column. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard investigated and found no evidence of shadow-banning of conservatives.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Conservative outlets like "The Weekly Standard" and "Big Government" have criticized fact checking of conservative content as a perceived liberal attempt to control discourse. A 2019 study found that fake news sharing was less common than perceived, and that actual consumption of fake news was limited. Another 2019 study found that older, more conservative people were more likely to have shared fake news during the 2016 election season than moderates, younger adults, or "super liberals". An Oxford study has shown that deliberate use of fake news in the U.S. is primarily associated with the hard right. According to a 2019 study of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 election season, 80% of "all content from suspect sources was shared by less than 1 percent of the human tweeters sampled... Those users were disproportionately politically conservative, older and more highly engaged with political news".


title: Media bias in the United States

text: The term "fake news" has been weaponized with the goal of undermining public trust in news media. President Donald Trump seized on the term "fake news" as a way of denigrating any story or outlet critical of him, even appearing to claim to have invented the term and handing out so-called "Fake News Awards" in 2017. Trump, followed by supporters such as Sean Hannity, uses the term "fake news" to describe any media coverage that casts him in a negative light. In 2018, Trump "described what he called the 'fake news' of the American press as 'The Enemy of the American people'", a phrase similar to one used by Stalin and other totalitarian leaders that also was reminiscent of Richard Nixon's inclusion of journalists on his "enemies list". In response, the United States Senate unanimously adopted a resolution which reaffirmed "the vital and indispensable role the free press serves" and was seen as a symbolic rebuke to Trump.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In the 19th century, many American newspapers made no pretense to lack of bias and openly advocated for a political party. Big cities would often have competing newspapers, supporting various political parties. To some extent, that was mitigated by a separation between news and editorial. News-reporting was expected to be relatively neutral or at least factual, but editorial was openly the opinion of the publisher. Editorials might also be accompanied by an editorial cartoon, which would frequently lampoon the publisher's opponents.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In an editorial for "The American Conservative", Patrick Buchanan wrote that reporting by "the liberal media establishment" on the Watergate scandal "played a central role in bringing down a president." Richard Nixon later complained, "I gave them a sword and they ran it right through me." Nixon's Vice-President Spiro Agnew attacked the media in a series of speeches, two of the most famous being written by White House aides William Safire and Buchanan himself, as "elitist" and "liberal." However, the media had also strongly criticized his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, for his handling of the Vietnam War, which was a factor for him not seeking a second term.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In 2004, Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem, and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed the political orientation of endorsements by US newspapers. They found an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, particularly an incumbent. In the 1940s and the 1950s, there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, that advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades to the extent that in the 1990s the authors found a slight Democratic lead in the average endorsement choice.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at the editorial choices of "The New York Times" from 1946 to 1997. He found that the "Times" displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. During presidential campaigns the "Times" systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare but only when the incumbent president is a Republican. Those topics are classified as Democratic ones because Gallup polls show that average US citizens think that Democratic candidates would be better at handling problems related to them. According to Puglisi, the "Times" since 1960 displays a more symmetric type of watchdog behavior just because during presidential campaigns, it also gives more coverage to the typically-Republican issue of defense when the incumbent president is a Democrat but less so when the incumbent is a Republican.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the conservative thinktank American Enterprise Institute studied the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 US newspapers from 1991 to 2004 and a subsample of the two ten newspapers and the Associated Press from 1985 to 2004. For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyzed how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines. The idea was to check whether newspapers display partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent president. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are 9.6–14.7% fewer positive stories when the incumbent president is a Republican.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal watchdog group, the Democratic candidate John Edwards was falsely maligned and was not given coverage commensurate with his standing in presidential campaign coverage because his message questioned corporate power.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A 2000 meta-analysis of research in 59 quantitative studies of media bias in American presidential campaigns from 1948 through 1996 found that media bias tends to cancel out, leaving little or no net bias. The authors concluded, "It is clear that the major source of bias charges is the individual perceptions of media consumers and, in particular, media consumers of a particularly ideological bent."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: It has also been acknowledged that media outlets have often used horse-race journalism with the intent of making elections more competitive. That form of political coverage involves diverting attention away from stronger candidates and hyping so-called dark horse contenders who seem more unlikely to win when the election cycle begins. Benjamin Disraeli used the term "dark horse" to describe horse racing in 1831 in "The Young Duke": "a dark horse which had never been thought of and which the careless St. James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph." The political analyst Larry Sabato stated in his 2006 book "Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections" that Disraeli's description of dark horses "now fits in neatly with the media's trend towards horse-race journalism and penchant for using sports analogies to describe presidential politics."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Often unlike national media, political science scholars seek to compile long-term data and research on the impact of political issues and voting in U.S. presidential elections, producing in-depth articles breaking down the issues.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: During the course of the election, some pundits accused the mainstream media of distorting facts in an effort to help Texas Governor George W. Bush win the election after Bush and Al Gore officially launched their campaigns in 1999. Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas, two commentators for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, called the media "serial exaggerators" and argued that several media outlets were constantly exaggerating criticism of Gore, such as by falsely claiming that Gore lied when he claimed he spoke in an overcrowded science class in Sarasota, Florida, and giving Bush a pass on certain issues, such as the fact that Bush had wildly exaggerated how much money he signed into the annual Texas state budget to help the uninsured during his second debate with Gore in October 2000. In the April 2000 issue of "Washington Monthly", the columnist Robert Parry also argued that several media outlets exaggerated Gore's supposed claim that he "discovered" the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, during a campaign speech in Concord, New Hampshire, on November 30, 1999, when he had claimed only that he "found" it after it was already evacuated in 1978 after chemical contamination. The "Rolling Stone" columnist Eric Boehlert also argued that media outlets exaggerated criticism of Gore as early as July 22, 1999, when Gore, known for being an environmentalist, had a friend release 500 million gallons of water into a drought-stricken river to help keep his boat afloat for a photo shoot. Media outlets, however, exaggerated the actual number of gallons that were released to four billion.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In the 2008 presidential election, media outlets were accused of discrediting Barack Obama's opponents in an effort to help him win the Democratic primary and later the general election. At the February debate, Tim Russert of NBC News was criticized for what some perceived as disproportionately-tough questioning of the Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton. Among the questions, Russert had asked Clinton but not Obama to provide the name of the new Russian president, who was Dmitry Medvedev. That was later parodied on "Saturday Night Live".


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In October 2007, liberal commentators accused Russert of harassing Clinton over the issue of supporting drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: On April 16, 2008, ABC News hosted a debate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos were criticized by viewers, bloggers and media critics for the poor quality of their questions. Many viewers said they considered some of the questions to be irrelevant compared to the importance of the faltering economy or the Iraq War. Included in that category were continued questions about Obama's former pastor, Clinton's assertion that she had to duck sniper fire in Bosnia more than a decade earlier, and Obama's failure to wear an American flag pin. The moderators focused on campaign gaffes, and some believed that they focused too much on Obama. Stephanopoulos defended their performance by claiming that "Senator Obama was the front-runner" and that the questions were "not inappropriate or irrelevant at all."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In an op-ed published on April 27, 2008, in "The New York Times", Elizabeth Edwards wrote that the media covered much more of "the rancor of the campaign" and "amount of money spent" than "the candidates' priorities, policies and principles." Author Erica Jong commented that "our press has become a sea of triviality, meanness and irrelevant chatter." A Gallup poll released on May 29, 2008, also estimated that more Americans felt the media was being harder on Clinton than they were on Obama.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In a joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors found disparate treatment by the three major cable networks of the Republican and Democratic candidates during the earliest five months of presidential primaries in 2007: "The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain faring the worst (63% negative) and Romney faring a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral. It is not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half of the Illinois Senator's stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A poll of likely presidential election voters released on March 14, 2007, by Zogby International reported that 83 percent of those surveyed believed in media bias, with 64 percent of respondents of the opinion the bias to favor liberals and 28 percent of respondents believing the bias to be conservative. In August 2008, the ombudsman of "The Washington Post" wrote that it had published almost three times as many front-page stories about Obama than it had about McCain since Obama won the Democratic party nomination that June. In September 2008 a Rasmussen poll found that 68 percent of voters believed that "most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win," and 49 percent of respondents stated that the reporters were helping Obama to get elected, but only 14 percent said the same about McCain. A further 51 percent said that the press was actively "trying to hurt" Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin with negative coverage. In October 2008, "Washington Post" media correspondent Howard Kurtz reported that Palin was again on the cover of "Newsweek" "but with the most biased campaign headline I've ever seen."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: After the election was over, the ombudsman Deborah Howell reviewed the coverage of the "Post" and concluded that it had been slanted toward Obama.<ref name="Howell 11/09/2008">Deborah Howell, "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage," "The Washington Post", November 9, 2008; Page B06</ref> "The "Post" provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts." Over the course of the campaign, the "Post" printed 594 "issues stories" and 1,295 "horse-race stories." There were more positive opinion pieces on Obama than McCain (32 to 13) and more negative pieces about McCain than Obama (58 to 32). Overall, more news stories were dedicated to Obama than McCain. Howell said that the results of her survey were comparable to those reported by the Project for Excellence in Journalism for the national media. (That report, issued on October 22, 2008, found that "coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable," with 57% of the stories issued after the conventions being negative and only 14% being positive. For the same period, 36% of the stories on Obama were positive, 35% were neutral or mixed, and 29% were negative.) She rated the biographical stories of the "Post" to be generally quite good, she concluded, "Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin 'Tony' Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The "Post" did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Various critics, particularly Hudson, have shown concern over the link between the news media's reporting and what they see as the trivialised nature of American elections. Hudson argued that America's news media elections coverage damages the democratic process. He argues that elections are centered on candidates, whose advancement depends on funds, personality and sound-bites, rather than serious political discussion or policies offered by parties. His argument is that it is on the media which Americans are dependent for information about politics (this is of course true almost by definition) and that they are therefore greatly influenced by the way the media report, which concentrates on short sound-bites, gaffes by candidates, and scandals. The reporting of elections avoids complex issues or issues which are time-consuming to explain. Of course, important political issues are generally both complex and time-consuming to explain, so are avoided.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: "The bites of information voters receive from both print and electronic media are simply insufficient for constructive political discourse... candidates for office have adjusted their style of campaigning in response to this tabloid style of media coverage... modern campaigns are exercises in image manipulation... Elections decided on sound bites, negative campaign commercials, and sensationalised exposure of personal character flaws provide no meaningful direction for government."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Studies have shown that all other 2016 candidates received vastly less media coverage than Donald Trump. Trump received more extensive media coverage than Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders combined when they were the only primary candidates left in the race. The Democratic primary received substantially less coverage than the Republican primary. Sanders received the most positive coverage of any candidate overall, but his opponent in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton, received the most negative coverage. Among the general election candidates, Trump received inordinate amounts of coverage on his policies and issues and on his personal character and life, but Clinton's emails controversy was a dominant feature of her coverage and earned more media coverage than all of her policy positions combined.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In addition to philosophical or economic biases, there are also subject biases, including criticism of media coverage about US foreign policy issues as being overly centered in Washington, DC. Coverage is variously cited as being "beltway centrism," framed in terms of domestic politics and established policy positions, following only Washington's 'Official Agendas', and mirroring only a "Washington Consensus." Regardless of the criticism, according to the "Columbia Journalism Review", "No news subject generates more complaints about media objectivity than the Middle East in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Stephen Zunes wrote that "mainstream and conservative Jewish organizations have mobilized considerable lobbying resources, financial contributions from the Jewish community, and citizen pressure on the news media and other forums of public discourse in support of the Israeli government."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: According to the professor of journalism Eric Alterman, debate among Middle East pundits "is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel." In 2002, he listed 56 columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel "reflexively and without qualification." Alterman identified only five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions. Journalists described as pro-Israel by Mearsheimer and Walt include "The New York Times" William Safire, A.M. Rosenthal, David Brooks, and Thomas Friedman; "The Washington Post"s Jim Hoagland, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will; and the "Los Angeles Times" Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, and Jonathan Chait.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: The 2007 book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" argued that there is a media bias in favor of Israel. It stated that a former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York said, "Of course, a lot of self-censorship goes on. Journalists, editors, and politicians are going to think twice about criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is good at orchestrating pressure."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: The journalist Michael Massing wrote in 2006, "Jewish organizations are quick to detect bias in the coverage of the Middle East, and quick to complain about it. That's especially true of late. As "The Forward" observed in late April [2002], 'rooting out perceived anti-Israel bias in the media has become for many American Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the conflict 6,000 miles away.'"


title: Media bias in the United States

text: "The Forward" related how one individual felt: "'There's a great frustration that American Jews want to do something,' said Ira Youdovin, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. 'In 1947, some number would have enlisted in the Haganah,' he said, referring to the pre-state Jewish armed force. 'There was a special American brigade. Nowadays you can't do that. The battle here is the hasbarah war,' Youdovin said, using a Hebrew term for public relations. 'We're winning, but we're very much concerned about the bad stuff.'"


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A 2003 "Boston Globe" article on the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America media watchdog group by Mark Jurkowitz argued, "To its supporters, CAMERA is figuratively—and perhaps literally—doing God's work, battling insidious anti-Israeli bias in the media. But its detractors see CAMERA as a myopic and vindictive special interest group trying to muscle its views into media coverage."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In 2003, a study released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting stated the network news disproportionately focused on pro-war sources and left out many anti-war sources. According to the study, 64% of total sources were in favor of the Iraq War, and total anti-war sources made up 10% of the media (only 3% of US sources were anti-war). The study stated that "viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In February 2004, a study was released by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting]. According to the study, which took place during October 2003, current or former government or military officials accounted for 76 percent of all 319 sources for news stories about Iraq that aired on network news channels.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: A widely cited public opinion study documented a correlation between news source and certain misconceptions about the Iraq War. Conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in October 2003, the poll asked Americans whether they believed statements about the Iraq War that were known to be false. Respondents were also asked for their primary news source: Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, "Print sources," or NPR. By cross-referencing the respondents to their primary news source, the study showed that more Fox News watchers held the misconceptions about the Iraq War. The director of Program on International Policy (PIPA), Stephen Kull, said, "While we cannot assert that these misconceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: In November 2018, Senator Chris Coons joined Senators Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in sending a letter to the Trump administration raising concerns about China's undue influence over US media outlets and academic institutions: "In American news outlets, Beijing has used financial ties to suppress negative information about the CCP. In the past four years, multiple media outlets with direct or indirect financial ties to China allegedly decided not to publish stories on wealth and corruption in the CCP. In one case, an editor resigned due to mounting self-censorship in the outlet's China coverage."


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Jonathan M. Ladd, who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of widespread popular belief in media bias is media telling their audience that other particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased is extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Kenneth Kim, in Communication Research Reports, argued that the overriding cause of popular belief in media bias is a media vs. media worldview. He used statistics to show that people see news content as neutral, fair, or biased based on its relation to news sources that report opposite views. Kim labeled this phenomenon HMP (hostile media perception). His results show that people are likely to process content in defensive ways based on the framing of this content in other media.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: AllSides assesses ideological biases of online sources to produce media bias charts, and presents similar stories from different perspectives.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: The Pew Research Center produced a guide to the political leanings of readers of several news outlets as part of a larger report on political polarization in the United States.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Reporters Without Borders has said that the US media lost a great deal of freedom between the 2004 and 2006 indices, citing the Judith Miller case and similar cases and laws restricting the confidentiality of sources as the main factors. They also cite the fact that reporters who question the American-led so called war on terror are sometimes regarded as suspicious. They rank the US as 53rd out of 168 countries in freedom of the press, comparable to Japan and Uruguay, but below all but one European Union country (Poland) and below most OECD countries (those that accept democracy and free markets). In the 2008 ranking, the U.S. moved up to 36, between Taiwan and Macedonia, but still far below its ranking in the late 20th century as a world leader in having a free and unbiased press. The U.S. briefly recovered in 2009 and 2010, rising to 20th place, but declined again and has maintained a position in the mid-40s from 2013 to 2018.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Media Matters for America work from a progressive viewpoint, Accuracy in Media and Media Research Center are conservative.


title: Media bias in the United States

text: Groups such as FactCheck argue that the media frequently get the facts wrong because they rely on biased sources of information. That includes using information provided to them from both parties.


title: Š

text: The grapheme Š, š (S with caron) is used in various contexts representing the sh sound like in the word "show", usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ or similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with ʃ or ʂ, but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. It represents the same sound as the Turkic letter Ş and the Romanian letter Ș (S-comma).


title: Š

text: For use in computer systems, "Š" and "š" are at Unicode codepoints U+0160 and U+0161 (Alt 0138 and Alt 0154 for input), respectively. In HTML code, the entities codice_1 and codice_2 can also be used to represent the characters.


title: Š

text: The symbol originates with the 15th-century Czech alphabet as introduced by the reforms of Jan Hus. From there, it was first adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830 to represent the same sound, and from there on into other orthographies, such as Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Slovene, Karelian, Sami, Veps and Sorbian.


title: Š

text: Some orthographies such as Bulgarian Cyrillic, Macedonian Cyrillic and Serbian Cyrillic use the "ш" letter which represents the sound "š" would represent in Latin alphabets. Moreover, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin standard languages adopted the Gaj's Croatian alphabet alongside Cyrillic thereby adopting "š", while the same alphabet is used for Romanization of Macedonian. Certain variants of Belarusian Latin and Bulgarian Latin also use the letter.


title: Š

text: In Finnish and Estonian, "š" occurs only in loanwords. On occasion, it is possible to replace "š" with "sh" but only when it is technically impossible to typeset the accented character.


title: Š

text: Polish and Hungarian do not use "š". Polish instead uses the digraph "sz" and Hungarian uses the basic latin letter "s", while the digraph "sz" equals to most other languages' letter "s".


title: Š

text: Outside of Europe, Syriac Latin adopted the letter but it, alongside other letters with diacritics, is rarely used. The alphabet is not used natively to write the language; Syriac alphabet is used instead. It is used in Lakota, Cheyenne, and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree), Classical Malay (until end of 19th century) and some African languages such as Northern Sotho and Songhay. It is used in the Persian Latin (Rumi) alphabet, equivalent to ش.


title: Š

text: The symbol is also used as the romanisation of Cyrillic ш in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration and deployed in the Latinic writing systems of Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bashkir. It is also used in some systems of transliterating Georgian to represent ().


title: Š

text: In addition, the grapheme transliterates cuneiform orthography of Sumerian and Akkadian or , and (based on Akkadian orthography) the Hittite phoneme, as well as the phoneme of Semitic languages, transliterating shin (Phoenician and its descendants), the direct predecessor of Cyrillic ш.


title: Rosa Linn

text: Roza Kostandyan (; born 20 May 2000), known professionally as Rosa Linn (), is an Armenian singer-songwriter. She started her career by getting signed by Nvak Collective and releasing her debut single "King" with Kiiara in 2021. In 2022, Linn in the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin, Italy with the song "Snap" and finished in 20th place. Following the contest, the song went viral on TikTok and charted globally; earning her a recording contract with Columbia Records.


title: Rosa Linn

text: Kostandyan was born in Vanadzor, Northern Armenia and lived in the United States for a year. She began playing the piano at the age of six and at the ages of 11 to 12 started songwriting. Kostandyan is also highly involved with writing and producing her own music. In 2013, she participated in the Armenian national selection for the Junior Eurovision Song Contest with the song "".


title: Rosa Linn

text: Rosa Linn started her professional musical career after signing a recording contract with US-based record label Nvak Collective, founded by Alex Salibian and Tamar Kaprelian. In September 2021, Rosa Linn released her debut single "King" in collaboration with American singer Kiiara. She made her television debut performance of the song during the morning show on Public Television Company of Armenia (AMPTV) in November 2021.


title: Rosa Linn

text: In February 2022, Rosa Linn was rumoured to represent in the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin, Italy. On 11 March, she was announced as the Armenian representative by AMPTV. Her Eurovision entry, titled "Snap", was released on 19 March alongside its music video. The song was written by Rosa Linn along with Tamar Kaprelian, Larzz Principato, Jeremy Dusoulet, Allie Crystal, and Courtney Harrell. Rosa Linn performed "Snap" on 10 May during the first semi-final of the contest, and qualified for the final. She performed the song once again in the final on 14 May and placed 20th.


title: Rosa Linn

text: Following the contest, "Snap" went viral on TikTok and entered numerous countries' national charts; reaching the top of the charts in the Flanders region of Belgium and the top ten in Austria, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. In August 2022, she signed a recording contract with Columbia Records. In October 2022, Linn was confirmed to be an opening act for Ed Sheeran on the North American leg of his +–=÷x Tour between June and July 2023. In the same month, she released a new music video for "Snap", filmed in the United States; and a collaborative single titled "WDIA (Would Do It Again)" with Dutch singer Duncan Laurence. On 31 October, she made her US television debut on "The Late Late Show with James Corden", where she performed "Snap" with arrangement by musicians using Armenian traditional instruments. Linn performed "Snap" as an interval act for the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2022, which took place on 11 December in Yerevan. She also wrote the common song for the contest, "Spin the Magic", performed by Maléna.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: The eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei) is a critically endangered species of the genus "Gorilla" and the largest living primate. At present, the species is subdivided into two subspecies. There are 3,800 eastern lowland gorillas or Grauer’s gorillas ("G. b. graueri") and 1,000 mountain gorillas ("G. b. beringei"). Illegal hunting threatens the species.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: There are two recognised subspecies of eastern gorilla: the mountain gorilla ("Gorilla beringei beringei") of the volcanic slopes of Rwanda, Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; and the eastern lowland gorilla or Grauer's gorilla ("Gorilla beringei graueri") in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: The eastern lowland gorillas and mountain gorillas were previously thought to be two of the three subspecies of one single species, the gorilla ("Gorilla gorilla"). However, genetic research has shown that the two eastern subspecies are far more closely related than the western subspecies: the western lowland gorilla ("G. gorilla gorilla"), which justified the separate classification. The two eastern subspecies are now classified as "G. beringei".


title: Eastern gorilla

text: The eastern gorilla is a large hominid with a large head, broad chest, and long arms. It has a flat nose with large nostrils. The face, hands, feet and breast are bald. The fur is mainly black, but adult males have a silvery "saddle" on their back. When the gorilla gets older, the hair on the saddle of the back becomes white, much like the gray hair of elderly people. This is why the older males are called "silverbacks". Grauer's gorilla has a shorter, thicker, deep black fur, while the mountain gorilla has a more bluish color. The mountain gorilla is slightly smaller and lighter than Grauer's gorilla, but still larger and heavier than the western lowland gorilla and the Cross River gorilla. Males are much larger than females. A full-grown male eastern gorilla typically weighs and stands upright and a female typically weighs and stands tall. The tallest silverback recorded was a individual shot in Alimbongo, northern Kivu in May 1938. The heaviest gorilla recorded was a silverback shot in Ambam, Cameroon, which weighed , although the latter area is within the range of the western gorilla, far outside that of the eastern gorilla.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: Mountain gorillas are restricted to the mountain rainforest and subalpine forest of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, southwestern Uganda and Rwanda. Grauer's gorilla occur across the forests of the Albertine Rift in eastern DRC.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: Eastern gorillas are herbivorous, with a heavily foliage based diet, due to lack of available fruit in their habitats. They have smaller home ranges than western gorillas as foliage is more abundant than fruit. They are diurnal but the majority of foraging occurs in the morning and late afternoon. At night, they build nests by folding over vegetation, usually on the ground.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: Eastern gorillas live in stable, cohesive family groups, led by a dominant silverback male. Eastern gorillas tend to have larger group sizes than their western relatives, numbering up to 35 individuals. There is no distinct breeding season and females give birth only once every 3–4 years due to the long period of parental care and a gestation period of 8.5 months. Newborn gorillas have greyish-pink skin and can crawl after 9 weeks; they are not fully weaned until 3.5 years. Males defend their females and offspring using their large size in intimidating displays involving charging and chest-beating.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: The eastern gorilla has become increasingly endangered since the 1990s, and the species was listed as critically endangered in September 2016 as its population continued to decrease. Primary threats to the eastern gorilla include habitat destruction for residential, commercial, and agricultural purposes, habitat fragmentation caused by transportation corridors and resource extraction, as well as disease. Between 1996 and 2016, the eastern gorilla lost more than 70 percent of its population, and by 2016 the total population was estimated to be less than 6,000. An exception to this declining trend is the mountain gorilla. According to the most recent estimates, there are approximately 1,004 mountain gorillas, and their numbers continue to grow.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: In some national parks, viewing mountain gorillas is a popular tourist attraction. These national parks include Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mgahinga Gorilla National Park and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. While ecotourism can benefit gorilla populations by generating revenue for conservation efforts, there is concern that increased exposure to humans will place gorillas at greater risk of contracting zoonotic diseases. Studies have shown that habituated eastern gorillas, that is, those that leave protected areas to forage in surrounding communities, have higher diseases rates than their unhabituated counterparts, with nearby humans and livestock as the likely sources of transmission.


title: Eastern gorilla

text: Unlike the western gorilla, there are few eastern gorillas in zoos. The Antwerp Zoo is the only zoo outside the native range of the species that has eastern gorillas. Outside the native range, the mountain gorilla is not held in captivity at all. Small groups consisting of animals confiscated from poachers are kept in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Grauer's gorillas at the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education (GRACE) center in , and mountain gorillas at the Senkwekwe Center in Virunga National Park.


SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated is a 2020 platform game developed by Purple Lamp Studios and published by THQ Nordic. Based on the Nickelodeon animated series "SpongeBob SquarePants," It is a remake of the console versions of Heavy Iron Studios' "" (2003). It is the first major game in the series since "SpongeBob HeroPants" (2015) and the first since the death of the show's creator Stephen Hillenburg in 2018. The game was released on June 23, 2020 for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Stadia. A version for mobile devices was released on January 21, 2021.


title: SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated

text: Despite receiving mixed reviews, the game was a commercial success, selling over 2 million copies. A spiritual sequel, "", is set for release in 2023.


text: The core gameplay involves collecting items and defeating the robots which have attacked various areas in Bikini Bottom while crossing platforms and avoiding environmental hazards like spikes and flames. Some areas require different characters to beat, as each character has its unique abilities. The player can control SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy. Switching characters requires the player to find a Bus Stop, upon using which the current character will switch to another, and using it again will switch back to the previous character, giving the player an option of two characters in each level. The default character throughout the game is SpongeBob; Sandy and Patrick do not share any levels as playable characters.


text: Throughout the game, the player will collect Shiny Objects, Socks, and Golden Spatulas. Shiny Objects are dropped by enemies and scattered throughout levels and can be used to pay clams to progress through levels and unlock extra challenges. They can also be traded with Mr. Krabs for Golden Spatulas. Socks are placed in levels in harder-to-reach locations, and 10 of them can be traded to Patrick for a Golden Spatula. Golden Spatulas are used to unlock new areas in the game, and 75 of them are required to fight the final boss.


text: A new addition to the remake is a multiplayer horde mode in which two players face waves of robotic enemies. The mode includes cut content from the original game, including a fight against a robotic Squidward, a scrapped version of Patrick's dream, and a cut phase of the Robo-SpongeBob fight.


text: Development for "Rehydrated" began as early as January 2018, when THQ Nordic enlisted Purple Lamp Games as one of their developers. In March 2018, THQ Nordic announced plans for "the global revival of several game titles" for many older Nickelodeon properties. This led to speculation that they were planning to remake or re-release several Nickelodeon games, including "Battle for Bikini Bottom".


text: "Rehydrated" was first officially announced on June 5, 2019, in the days leading up to E3 2019. The game was not playable until Gamescom, which started August 20 that year, where visitors could get their hands on it at THQ Nordic's booth. On April 16, 2020, it was announced that the game will be released on June 23, 2020. iOS and Android versions of the game were released on January 21, 2021.


text: The game is available in two limited editions on all platforms. The Shiny Edition includes wall stickers, six lithographs, special "SpongeBob SquarePants" tennis socks, and a figurine of SpongeBob with a flexible tongue and a golden spatula in his hand. In addition to that, the F.U.N. Edition also comes with two similarly sized figurines of Sandy Cheeks and Patrick Star, as well as a set of five tiki keyrings.


text: The game features both the original archival recordings from the main campaign, as well as new recordings, from the English voice cast, as well as new recordings from the French, German, Italian, Spanish (both Spain and Latin American), Polish and Japanese voice casts. It supports text and subtitles in Portuguese, Russian, Malay, Thai, Korean, and Simplified Chinese, alongside the languages mentioned above.


text: The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and supports 4K resolution on the enhanced PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X models.


text: "SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated" received "mixed or average" reviews according to Metacritic.


text: "IGN" gave the game 5/10, saying that it "sinks under its reverence to nostalgia" and wrote, "[T]here are bright spots that remain fun almost two decades later, and there are pops of ingenuity in its reworking, but it does little to stand alongside the best, or even the pretty good, platformer remakes and remasters we've seen this generation." In its 2/10 review, "GameSpot" wrote that "remasters, ports, and remakes are nice because they make games more accessible to new audiences, and the ones that excel understand that some features from the game's era are antiquated and should be updated or removed. "SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated" flops like a fish out of water when it comes to this." They concluded that the game "winds up being an unpleasant nostalgia trip that nobody should pack their bags for."


text: "SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated" placed at 19 on NPD's list of top 20 sales in the month of June. In the UK, "Rehydrated" was the 3rd bestselling video game software in the week of June 27, 2020.


text: On August 13, 2020, "Rehydrated" was announced to have sold over 1 million copies. As of May 19, 2021, it reached more than 2 million copies.


text: In January 2021, THQ Nordic CEO Klemens Kreuzer called "Rehydrated" a "fantastic success" due to its sales and hinted at the potential for similar games to be developed by the studio in the future. A spiritual sequel, "", was announced on September 17, 2021. The game is scheduled for release on Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2023.


title: George Benson discography

text: The discography of George Benson consists of thirty-six studio albums and five live albums on Prestige Records, Columbia Records, Verve Records, A&M Records, CTI Records, Warner Bros. Records, GRP Records, Concord Records, and Provogue Records, as well as two music DVDs.


title: George Benson discography

text: Note: this discography consists only original releases. Reissues of previously released albums are not included into this discography. Among them are albums like "Willow Weep for Me", "Witchcraft", "Take Five", "Cast Your Fate to the Wind", "GB", "Live in Concert", "The Electrifying George Benson", "The Most Exciting New Guitarist on the Jazz Scene", "California Dreamin'", "Lil Darlin'", "Masquerade", "The Masquerade Is Over", "Live at Casa Caribe", "All Blues", "Blue Bossa", "After Hours", "Golden Legends Live", "Jazz After Hours with George Benson" and many others.


title: George Benson discography

text: Harlem Underground Band "Harlem Underground" (1976) and George Benson with the Harlem Underground Band "Erotic Moods" (1978) are from the same session. "Erotic Moods" was credited to George Benson with The Harlem Underground Band following the success of Benson's albums "Breezin'" and "In Flight", but is not considered a George Benson album. He wasn't the frontman and it was not his scheduled release. 2 tracks from the 1978 album were also on the 1976 album.


title: George Benson discography

text: Later was released on CD on various artists' compilation "The Stress Decade: Adventures In Clubland 1990-99" in 1999 and on various artists' compilation "DMC Classic Remixes Volume One - Legendary Producer Mixes" in 2009.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: Arielle St. Cyr Vandenberg (born September 27, 1986) is an American actress, television host and model.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: She is best known as the host of the American version of the British reality show "Love Island", which premiered in July 2019 on CBS through to its third season in 2021.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: Vandenberg was born on September 27, 1986, in Los Angeles County, California, the only child of Dirk and DeEtte Vandenberg. She was raised in Fallbrook, California, and graduated from Fallbrook Union High School. She studied ballet, tap and jazz dancing at the age of five, and later became involved in community theater.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: Vandenberg guest-starred in the first two seasons of "Meet the Browns" as London Sheraton, and had a recurring guest role in "Greek" as Lisa Lawson. She has made once-off appearances in other television series including "", "Bones", "How I Met Your Mother" and "Numbers", and has appeared in non-speaking roles in films including "Epic Movie" and "The Ugly Truth". She has starred in several television commercials for brands including Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola Zero, State Farm Insurance, and Progressive Auto Insurance. In 2013, Vandenberg appeared in the music video for the single "R U Mine?" by Arctic Monkeys.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: In June 2019, Vandenberg was announced as the host of the reality show "Love Island USA", which premiered in July 2019 on CBS.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: She hosted three seasons of it until CBS did not renew the show for a fourth season and was picked up by streaming service Peacock and was replaced by actress Sarah Hyland.


title: Arielle Vandenberg

text: As of September 2019, Vandenberg has been engaged to fellow Vine star Matt Cutshall. She previously dated Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner for three years from 2011 to 2014. She dated actor Will Arnett in 2015.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: To become a full member of the Mafia or Cosa Nostra (both the original Sicilian Mafia or the Italian-American offshoot often known as the "American Mafia") – to become a "man of honor" or a "made man" – an aspiring member must take part in an initiation ritual or initiation ceremony. The ceremony involves significant ritual, oaths, blood, and an agreement is made to follow the rules of the Mafia as presented to the inductee. The first known account of the ceremony dates back to 1877 in Sicily.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The typical sequence of the ceremony according to several distinct descriptions has common features. First, the new recruit is led into the presence of other members and presented by a member. The association is explained, including its basic rules, then his finger is pricked with a needle by the officiating member. A few drops of blood are spilled on a card bearing the likeness of a saint, the card is set on fire, and finally, while the card is passed rapidly from hand to hand to avoid burns, the novice takes an oath of loyalty to the Mafia family. This may have been inspired by the oral legends of initiation rituals of the Sicilian sect Beati Paoli, popularized in 1909 by the William Galt serialized novel "I Beati Paoli".


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The first known account of the ceremony dates back to 1877 in Monreale in an article in the "Giornale di Sicilia" in an account about the Stuppagghiari, an early Mafia-type organisation. Other early accounts were during a trial against the "Fratellanza" (Brotherhood) in Agrigento (1884) and the "Fratuzzi" (Little Brothers) in Bagheria (1889).


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: One of the first life accounts of an initiation ceremony was given by Bernardino Verro, a leader of the Fasci Siciliani, a popular social movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the early 1890s. To give the movement teeth and protect himself from harm, Verro joined the "Fratuzzi" in Corleone. In a memoir written many years later, he describes the initiation ritual he underwent in the spring of 1893:


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Soon after Verro broke with the Mafia and – according to police reports – became their most bitter enemy. He was killed by the Mafia in 1915 when he was the mayor of Corleone.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: As a result of the Apalachin meeting, the membership books to become a made man in the mob were closed in 1957, and were not reopened until 1976. The first known account of the ritual in the United States was provided in 1963 by Joe Valachi, who was initiated in 1930, in his testimony at the McClellan hearings. Valachi's was a high-profile case, and helped convince the country of the existence of the organization in the United States called the Cosa Nostra, also known as the Mafia. He provided the FBI with first-hand information about the inside of the Mafia, including one of the first ever descriptions of the induction ceremony.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The Mafia solicits specific people for membership—one cannot just choose to join up. In Tommaso Buscetta's testimony for the Pizza Connection Trial, he was asked what he did to get into the Cosa Nostra. He answered, "I didn't make out any application to become a member—I was called, I was invited." Joe Valachi had an extended courtship before he finally consented to join. He was eventually swayed by the argument of Mafioso Bobby Doyle, who said that a solo career of crime was much more dangerous. Doyle said to Valachi, "Join us and you will be made. You will earn money and you are not to steal anymore." Things had been getting difficult for Valachi in terms of frequent arrests and other consequences of his lifestyle, and he acknowledged the logic of Doyle's argument.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The ceremony is a dinner or a meeting. Several people may be inducted at once. When inducted, "... they are 'made' or 'baptized' or 'get their badges.'" Other terms used are "wiseguys", "a friend of ours", "good fellow", "one of us", and "straightened out".


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: I sit down at the table. There is wine. Someone put a gun and a knife in front of me. The gun was a .38 and the knife was what we call a dagger. Maranzano [the boss] motions us up and we say some words in Italian. Then Joe Bonanno pricks my finger with a pin and squeezes until the blood comes out. What then happens, Mr. Maranzano says, 'This blood means that we are now one Family. You live by the gun and the knife and you die by the gun and the knife.'


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Valachi was inducted with three others. There were about 40 members present, so the new initiates could "meet the family."


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: During the Patriarca crime family's induction of 1989 that was taped by the FBI, several other details were discovered. Before the inductee Tortora took the oath, he was told that he would be baptized. "You were baptized when you were a baby, your parents did it. But now, this time, we gonna baptize you." The baptism seems to represent the new stage of life that is beginning.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: This is one example of the family mentality of the Mafia. It is implied that the Mafia is taking the place of the member's family, of his parents. Further evidence of this mentality can be seen when Tortora is asked if he would kill his brother for the Mafia. This mentality most likely comes about because members are giving their entire lives to the organization. The oaths themselves talk about the family bond, and we can conjecture that the rules of secrecy represent the family loyalty as well as a sense of self-preservation. Despite rivalries, all mafia families are considered related. Even between groups in Sicily and New York City, there is a sense of brotherhood.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: In another variation in Valachi's description in the 1989 induction recording, inductee Flamaro specifically had his trigger finger pricked—which affirms that there is symbolism in the gesture. After this, a compadre/buddy was chosen for him, and, unlike other ceremonies described, no mention was made of burning a picture of a saint. In Buscetta's testimony, he said that when his finger was pricked, the blood was transferred to a picture of a saint, which was then burned. Buscetta then swore that if he disobeyed the rules, "my flesh would burn like this saint." A variation on this oath is "As burns this saint, so will burn my soul. I enter alive and I will have to get out dead." Jimmy Fratianno, inducted in 1947, described the Capo pricking his finger and saying, "This drop of blood symbolizes your birth into our family, we are one until death." The ceremony is finished with a kiss administered to both cheeks of the new mafiosi.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: In the past, it was said that to complete the induction process, the potential member was to kill someone, though the practice seems to have died out for the most part.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The Mafia Code is remarkably similar to that of not only other crime organizations and societies, but also to that present in American prisons. Donald Cressey notes that it is basically the same as the thieves code, which he outlines as having five basic parts:


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Jimmy Fratianno was inducted to the mafia in 1947, and swore an oath similar to Valachi. Three rules were given to him: "You must never betray any of the secrets of this Cosa Nostra. You must never violate the wife or children of another member. You must never become involved with narcotics."


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: In the Patriarca ceremony, Joseph Russo also explained that you do not mess around with sisters, wives, or girlfriends, unless you have "honorable" intentions.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Buscetta also related how he was instructed about the "appropriate manner" to act. He said he was told to "be silent, not to look at other men's wives or women, not to steal and especially, at all times when I was called, I had to rush, leaving whatever I was doing." The penalty for breaking these laws was death.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The most important rule is the Omertà, the oath of silence. It is a frequently broken rule, as seen by FBI informants, but also punishable by death. Biagio DiGiacomo emphasized the severity of Omertà when he said, "It's no hope, no Jesus, no Madonna, nobody can help us if we ever give up this secret to anybody, any kinds of friends of mine, let's say. This thing cannot be exposed."


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Rules about drugs are reiterated in many accounts, where it is detailed that members must abstain from both using and selling drugs of any kind. In Joe Bonanno's 1983 autobiography he stated that neither he nor his family participated in the drug trade, calling it a "filthy business." These rules are often broken, as evidenced by the FBI, and it has been questioned whether this rule was ever enforced, or if it is simply a myth. Regardless, in more recent times there is little support for any abstinence from drug rackets on the part of the mafia. In New York City, the five crime families had a monopoly on the drug trade.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Introductions were very particularly laid out. People not of the Mafia were introduced as "a friend of mine." Members were referred to as "a friend of ours." Never were they allowed to say who they were in an introduction, except in particular circumstances. When introduced, members no longer follow the tradition of kissing, because it attracted too much attention from authorities.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Genovese soldier Joe Valachi was convicted of narcotics violations in 1959 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Valachi's motivations for becoming an informer had been the subject of some debate: Valachi claimed to be testifying as a public service and to expose a powerful criminal organization that he had blamed for ruining his life, but it is also possible he was hoping for government protection as part of a plea bargain in which he was sentenced to life imprisonment instead of the death penalty for a murder, which he had committed in 1962 while in prison for his narcotics violation.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Valachi murdered a man in prison who feared mob boss, and fellow prisoner, Vito Genovese had ordered to kill him. Valachi and Genovese were both serving sentences for heroin trafficking. On June 22, 1962, using a pipe left near some construction work, Valachi bludgeoned an inmate to death who he had mistaken for Joseph DiPalermo, a Mafia member who he believed had been contracted to kill him. After time with FBI handlers, Valachi came forward with a story of Genovese giving him a kiss on the cheek, which he took as a "kiss of death". A $100,000 bounty for Valachi's death had been placed by Genovese.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Soon after, Valachi decided to co-operate with the U.S. Justice Department. In October 1963, Valachi testified before Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations, known as the Valachi hearings, stating that the Italian-American Mafia actually existed, the first time a member had acknowledged its existence in public. Valachi's testimony was the first major violation of omertà, breaking his blood oath. He was the first member of the Italian-American Mafia to acknowledge its existence publicly, and is credited with popularization of the term "cosa nostra".


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: Although Valachi's disclosures never led directly to the prosecution of any Mafia leaders, he provided many details of the history of the Mafia, operations and rituals, aided in the solution of several unsolved murders, and named many members and the major crime families. The trial exposed American organized crime to the world through Valachi's televised testimony.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: On October 29, 1989, in Medford, Massachusetts, the FBI taped an initiation ceremony of New England's Patriarca crime family. There had been some controversy surrounding this bugging, given that the warrant for the 'roaming bug' used to tape the ceremony was given on false information.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: One source details that the members involved in this ceremony were the consiglieri Joseph Russo, who conducted parts of the ceremony; mobster capos Biagio DiGiacomo, who administered the oaths; Robert F. Carrozza; Vincent M. Ferrara; Charles Quintina—all from Boston—and Matthew Guglielmetti, from the Providence, Rhode Island area; and inductees Robert DeLuca, Vincent Federico, Carmen Tortora, and Richard Floramo. Another newspaper article states that there were 17 mafiosi present, including the current boss, Raymond Patriarca, Jr., and other high-ranking officials in the family.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: The FBI surveillance of this ceremony was the tail-end of a five-year investigation of the crime families in the area, which resulted in a host of indictments and arrests. Among those indicted were Patriarca, DiGiacomo, Russo, Tortora, Ferrara, Carrozza, and Guglielmetti, all of whom were present at the ceremony. Additional big names of those that were indicted are Antonio L. Spagnola, Nicholas Bianco, Louis Failla, and John E. Farrell. Information from the ceremony was used in the case against the Mafiosi.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: FBI Boston Mafia specialist Thomas A. Hughes speculated that the Patriarca crime family lost honor and favor as a result of the sacred ceremony being taped under their watch.


title: Initiation ritual (mafia)

text: In November 2015, Damiano Zummo, a reputed acting captain in the Bonanno crime family was involved in the induction ceremony of an undercover police agent, which was secretly recorded, in Canada. Zummo played a major role in the ceremony and named others at a higher level in the organization on the recording. A Brooklyn court official later said, "The recording of a secret induction ceremony is an extraordinary achievement for law enforcement and deals a significant blow to La Cosa Nostra." The recording also led to the arrest of 13 mobsters in November 2017, including Domenico Violi of the Luppino crime family in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, who was named underboss of the Buffalo crime family in October 2017.


title: Jasmin (Indian actress)

text: Jasmin is an Indian actress who acted in a few Hindi films. Her last movie was "Veerana", produced and directed by Ramsay Brothers. After this movie, she suspiciously disappeared, and nobody knows her whereabouts. Many people claim that she either committed suicide due to underworld links or died of an illness. There is another theory that she got settled abroad.


title: Jasmin (Indian actress)

text: Jasmin made her debut in Bollywood in 1979 with "Sarkari Mehmaan". In 1984, her film "Divorce" was released. In 1988, her film "Veerana" was released.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) is one of the eleven unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). It unifies the direction of cyberspace operations, strengthens DoD cyberspace capabilities, and integrates and bolsters DoD's cyber expertise.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: USCYBERCOM was created in mid-2009 at the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. It cooperates with NSA networks and has been concurrently headed by the director of the National Security Agency since its inception. While originally created with a defensive mission in mind, it has increasingly been viewed as an offensive force. On 18 August 2017, it was announced that USCYBERCOM would be elevated to the status of a full and independent unified combatant command.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: The text "9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a", located in the command's emblem, is the MD5 hash of their mission statement.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: The command is charged with pulling together existing cyberspace resources, creating synergies and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the information security environment. USCYBERCOM is tasked with centralizing command of cyberspace operations, strengthening DoD cyberspace capabilities, and integrating and bolstering DoD's cyber expertise.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: An intention by the U.S. Air Force to create a 'cyber command' was announced in October 2006. An Air Force Cyber Command was created in a provisional status in November 2006. However, in October 2008, it was announced the command would not be brought into permanent activation.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: On 23 June 2009, the Secretary of Defense directed the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) to establish USCYBERCOM. In May 2010, General Keith Alexander outlined his views in a report for the United States House Committee on Armed Services subcommittee:


title: United States Cyber Command

text: Initial operational capability was attained on 21 May 2010. General Alexander was promoted to four-star rank, becoming one of United States's 38 four-star officers, and took charge of U.S. Cyber Command in a ceremony at Fort Meade that was attended by Commander of U.S. Central Command GEN David Petraeus, and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: The command assumed responsibility for several existing organizations. The Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO) and the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare (JFCC-NW) were absorbed by the command. The Defense Information Systems Agency, where JTF-GNO operated, provides technical assistance for network and information assurance to USCYBERCOM, and is moving its headquarters to Fort Meade.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: President Obama signed into law, on 23 December 2016, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year (FY) 2017, which elevated USCYBERCOM to a unified combatant command. The FY 2017 NDAA also specified that the dual-hatted arrangement of the commander of USCYBERCOM will not be terminated until the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff jointly certify that ending this arrangement will not pose risks to the military effectiveness of CYBERCOM that are unacceptable to the national security interests of the United States.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: There are concerns that the Pentagon and NSA will overshadow any civilian cyber defense efforts. There are also concerns on whether the command will assist in civilian cyber defense efforts. According to Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn, the command "will lead day-to-day defense and protection of all DoD networks. It will be responsible for DoD's networks – the dot-mil world. Responsibility for federal civilian networks – dot-gov – stays with the Department of Homeland Security, and that's exactly how it should be." Alexander notes, however, that if faced with cyber hostilities an executive order could expand Cyber Command's spectrum of operations to include, for instance, assisting the Department of Homeland Security in defense of their networks.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: Some military leaders claim that the existing cultures of the Army, Navy, and Air Force are fundamentally incompatible with that of cyber warfare. Major Robert Costa (USAF) even suggested a sixth branch of the military, an Information (Cyber) Service with Title 10 responsibilities analogous to its sister services in 2002 noting:


title: United States Cyber Command

text: Others have also discussed the creation of a cyber-warfare branch. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Conti and Colonel John "Buck" Surdu (chief of staff of the United States Army Research, Development and Engineering Command) stated that the three major services are "properly positioned to fight kinetic wars, and they value skills such as marksmanship, physical strength, the ability to leap out of airplanes and lead combat units under enemy fire."


title: United States Cyber Command

text: Conti and Surdu reasoned, "Adding an efficient and effective cyber branch alongside the Army, Navy and Air Force would provide our nation with the capability to defend our technological infrastructure and conduct offensive operations. Perhaps more important, the existence of this capability would serve as a strong deterrent for our nation's enemies."


title: United States Cyber Command

text: In response to concerns about the military's right to respond to cyber attacks, General Alexander stated "The U.S. must fire back against cyber attacks swiftly and strongly and should act to counter or disable a threat even when the identity of the attacker is unknown" prior to his confirmation hearings before the United States Congress. This came in response to incidents such as a 2008 operation to take down a government-run extremist honeypot in Saudi Arabia. "Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum".


title: United States Cyber Command

text: "The new U.S. Cyber Command needs to strike a balance between protecting military assets and personal privacy." stated Alexander, in a Defense Department release. If confirmed, Alexander said, his main focus will be on building capacity and capability to secure the networks and educating the public on the command's intent.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: "This command is not about an effort to militarize cyber space," he said. "Rather, it's about safeguarding our military assets."


title: United States Cyber Command

text: In July 2011, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn announced in a conference that "We have, within Cyber Command, a full spectrum of capabilities, but the thrust of the strategy is defensive." "The strategy rests on five pillars, he said: treat cyber as a domain; employ more active defenses; support the Department of Homeland Security in protecting critical infrastructure networks; practice collective defense with allies and international partners; and reduce the advantages attackers have on the Internet."


title: United States Cyber Command

text: In 2013, USCYBERCOM held a classified exercise in which reserve officers (with extensive experience in their civilian cyber-security work) easily defeated active duty cyber warriors. In 2015 Eric Rosenbach, the principal cyber adviser to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, said DoD was looking at alternatives to staffing with just active-duty military. Beginning that year, USCYBERCOM added 133 teams (staffing out at 6,000 people), with the intent that at least 15% of the personnel would be reserve cyber operations airmen. These new teams had achieved "initial operating capability" (IOC) as of 21 October 2016. Officials noted that IOC is not the same as combat readiness, but is the first step in that direction.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: President Barack Obama's Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity was formed to develop a plan for protecting cyberspace. The commission released a report in December 2016. The report made 16 major recommendations regarding the intertwining roles of the military, government administration and the private sector in providing cyber security.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: President Trump indicated that he wanted a full review of Cyber Command during his bid for presidency. During his presidency, the Trump administration made Cyber Command a unified combatant command, and took other measures attempting to deter cyber attacks. However, the FBI reported that they logged a record number of complaints and economic losses in 2019, as cybercrime continued to grow.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: The creation of U.S. Cyber Command appears to have motivated other countries in this arena. In December 2009, South Korea announced the creation of a cyber warfare command. Reportedly, this was in response to North Korea's creation of a cyber warfare unit. In addition, the British GCHQ has begun preparing a cyber force. Furthermore, a shift in military interest in cyber warfare has motivated the creation of the first U.S. Cyber Warfare Intelligence Center. In 2010, China introduced a department dedicated to defensive cyber war and information security in response to the creation of USCYBERCOM.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: In June 2019, Russia has conceded that it is "possible" its electrical grid was under cyberattack by the United States. The "New York Times" reported that hackers from the U.S. Cyber Command planted malware potentially capable of disrupting the Russian electrical grid.


title: United States Cyber Command

text: The commander of U.S. Cyber Command is a statutory office (), and is held by a four-star general, or if the commander is a Navy officer, a four-star admiral.


title: Mount Roraima

text: Mount Roraima ( ) is the highest of the Pakaraima chain of tepuis (table-top mountain) or plateaux in South America. It is located at the junction of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. A characteristic large flat-topped mountain surrounded by cliffs 400 to 1,000 meters high. The highest point of Mount Roraima is located on the southern edge of the cliff at an altitude of 2,810 meters in Venezuela, and another protrusion at an altitude of 2,772 meters at the junction of the three countries in the north of the plateau is the highest point in Guyana. The name of Mount Roraima came from the native Pemon people. "Roroi" in the Pemon language means "blue-green", and "ma" means "great".


title: Mount Roraima

text: Leaching caused by intense rainfall has shaped the peculiar topography of the summit, and the geographical isolation of Mount Roraima has made it home to much endemic flora and fauna. Western exploration of Mount Roraima did not begin until the 19th century, when it was first climbed by a British expedition in 1884. Yet despite subsequent expeditions, its flora and geology remain largely unknown. The privileged setting and relatively easy access and climbing conditions on the south side of the cliffs make Mount Roraima one of the most popular destinations for hikers.


title: Mount Roraima

text: Mount Roraima is located in the northern part of South America, the Pacarema Mountains in the eastern part of the Guyana Plateau, Brazil in the east accounting for 5% of its area, Guyana in the north accounting for 10%, and Venezuela in the south and west accounting for 85%. Access to Mount Roraima from the Venezuelan side is close to the road and relatively easy; however, for both Brazil and Guyana the area is completely isolated and can only be reached by a few days of forest hikes or small local airstrip.