RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/22/dementia-and-double-standards/

Every once in a while media bias is so flagrant, it’s worth pointing out.

At an event in North Carolina last Thursday, President Joe Biden called out for a congresswoman with whom he claimed he’d just been photographed. She was, at the time, in Washington, D.C.

At an event in New Hampshire the next day, presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to mix up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about Jan. 6.

Guess which mental lapse was ignored while the other was covered by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, ABC News, The Hill, PBS, and countless other news outlets.

About a minute into his speech about the taxpayer money he’s dumping into high-speed rail, Biden veered off his teleprompter and apparently forgot where he was, or what day it was.

“Where’s Deborah?” he asks, referring to Rep. Deborah Ross, who was in Washington. “Did she — I just had my picture taken with her. That’s probably why she left. (Laughter.) No, all kidding aside — but, anyway — you — oh, she couldn’t be here, actually. That’s not true. I got it mixed up.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/todays_journalists_seek_power_not_truth.html

NPR, The New York Times, and other leftist propaganda organs parading as reliable news publications wrapped up 2023 by jeering House Republicans for passing only twenty-seven bills that became laws.  Hyperventilating like out-of-shape Chris Christie clones perpetually catching their breath, the Fourth Estate’s most prestigious windbags could not hide their priggish condescension: Republican legislators simply cannot legislate, they huffed in unison.  

I know the “Yes, Daddy, govern me harder!” crowd gets goosebumps every time the ignoramuses and perverts in D.C. create a new rule that comes with the threat of a good spanking, but it still amazes me how desperately today’s “journalists” desire for the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.  

The United States of America has been around for two and a half centuries.  During that time, tens of thousands of federal laws, rules, regulations, and executive orders have been created to squash and squeeze Americans’ natural liberties into smaller and smaller sanctioned containers suitable for TSA inspection.  It would be interesting to know just how many more decades of legislating and how many thousands of additional recorded laws it would take before the masochists at The New York Times finally feel as if they have been sufficiently governed!

Mr. Edward Holman commented recently that the creepy JournoList community of leftist “reporters” who collaborated to push narratives and news coverage favorable to Barack Obama during his rise to power crippled the profession permanently: “A free press cannot secretly conspire to rig elections by coordinating to destroy candidates, movements (TEA Party, MAGA, etc) they dislike with false accusations by anonymous sources.”  I heartily agree.  The propaganda “journalism” legitimized by the JournoList cabal was as loud of a death knell for objective reporting (and the enduring independence of the press) as they come.  

Equally demonstrative of journalism’s demise has been the corporate domestication of reporters and their lamentable transformation from an unruly gang of rebellious muckrakers and misfits who naturally despised the status quo into a docile pack of housebroken and primped-up poodles all desperate to service the “ruling class.”  You don’t get anything as noxious as a JournoList to eat through the body politic like a parasite through its host without first initiating a widespread campaign to spay and neuter those journalists in the profession packing cojones as well as brains.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/good-riddance-to-mehdi-hasan/

The MSNBC host’s fact-challenged invective won’t be missed.

MSNBC has bid farewell to yet another anchor whose penchant for insipid demagoguery far outstrips any actual talent.

Mehdi Hasan, who slanders conservatives nearly as much as he slanders “Zionists” (wink, wink), announced last week his intention to quit MSNBC. The news came not long after the network axed his weekend show that nobody watched.

“With this show going away,” Hasan told those who happened to tune in that evening, “I’ve decided that it’s time for me to look for a new challenge.”

Attracting viewers seemed plenty enough of a challenge, but okay.

MSNBC last November announced a weekend reshuffling, citing as chief among its reasons the looming 2024 presidential election. And among those to get the cut was none other than the British-born Al Jazeera English and Intercept alumnus. In response to the news, a member of the House of Representatives famous for her antisemitic remarks demanded that the network reverse its decision, suggesting that Hasan’s loss of his show, which launched in 2021, was somehow an affront to “free expression.”

“Mehdi is one of the most brilliant and most prominent Muslim journalists in the U.S.,” said Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar. “It is deeply troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices. Anyone who cares about free expression should be concerned.”

https://quillette.com/2024/01/05/the-lights-are-going-out-all-over-america/

Cancellations of people and events are most damaging when authorities surrender to the demands of the cancellers without a fight. When a university fails to insist that a “controversial” speaker be assured of a hearing in the teeth of noisy protests, it does more than cede victory to the protesters in return for a (temporarily) quiet life. This kind of capitulation tears another hole in the fabric of civil society, the free existence of which demands respect for a rule of free speech and publication, however unwelcome some speech and some publishing may be. Should the observation of this rule be replaced by a claim that speech on selected themes can cause fear and “pain,” public debate—especially in universities—will find itself at the mercy of self-appointed commissars tasked with sparing people psychological and emotional damage.

The US media enjoys the world’s strongest protections of speech and publication, so it might have been counted on to oppose this movement in the name of those freedoms. But instances of journalists being fired or forced to resign for writing or saying the wrong thing have been growing, and these cases tend to follow a similar pattern. First, a writer or editor publishes a piece that is deemed offensive to one or more groups of “marginalised” individuals. Second, activists, influencers, celebrities, and not infrequently the writer’s/editor’s own colleagues informally collaborate in a sustained social-media mobbing of the publication in question and any staffers unwise enough to defend the article at issue. Third, following a period of agonised indecision, the writer/editor is pushed out and the publication releases a craven apology detailing the hurt caused and the lessons learned. Upshot? The mob is greatly empowered and the spectrum of permissible opinion shrinks.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/max-blumenthal-hamas-apologist/

One of the most loyal and longest-serving members of the Clinton Mafia is the former Beltway reporter Sidney Blumenthal, now 75, whom even the New York Times, in its review of his 2003 book The Clinton Wars, described as a “courtier” for Bill and Hillary,  and whose many nefarious activities include an intimate involvement in the psychopathically mendacious Clintonista propaganda operation known as Media Matters for America.

Our topic today, however, is not the diabolical Sidney but his equally odious offspring Max, now 46 – who, as it happens, also started out as a more than typically partisan journalist. From the get-go, as I wrote in a 2019 profile of him for Commentary, Max’s approach to his ideological opponents was to try “to discredit them, to tar them with guilt by association, to paint them (however decent, independent, and mainstream they might be) as extremists, bigots, and tools of nefarious interests, and, not infrequently, to mount extremely personal assaults, complete with unfounded rumors and even outright lies.” Like father, like son.

Max’s first book, Republican Gomorrah (2009), was a takedown of the GOP; his second and third, Goliath (2013) and The 51-Day War (2014), were all-out attacks on Israel and whitewashes of Hamas. Even for legendary Israel-haters, the Israel-bashing was too much: lefty commentator Eric Alterman quipped that Goliath “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.” In my Commentary piece, I noted that after a still-mysterious Kremlin-fund trip to Moscow, Max reversed his position on Bashar al-Assad completely; a month later, he founded his website, Grayzone, where, when not championing the likes of Putin, Assad, and Maduro – or denying that China is committing genocide against the Uyghars – he’s busy arguing that events like the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre and the 2017 Manchester bombing don’t count as acts of jihad.