RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/19/the-new-york-times-is-the-trump-hate-drug-kingpin/

If Russian collusion has been the opiate of the Trump-hating masses for more than two years, the New York Times was one of its biggest suppliers.

Since late 2016, desperate to drown their sorrows over Donald Trump’s shocking win, political junkies on the Left and NeverTrump Right eased their inner pain with a daily collusion fix injected courtesy of the Gray Lady. With one click on the front page or opinion section, Times’ readers could satisfy their anti-Trump addiction while making them feel, if only for a few fleeting moments, powerful and in control.

Pain would give way to rage, then a false sense of hope. Surely the man installed by Vladimir Putin would never serve out his term, they would say to themselves while feeding their insatiable craving. And just as the high wore off, the Times would offer another hit, provoking hallucinations about Trump and his corrupt family being hauled out of the White House in handcuffs by Robert Mueller.

So, in a way, you can’t blame the Times for obsessively covering the fabricated Trump-Russia collusion storyline. It’s what successful drug dealers do—keep their customers hooked on a steady drip of dope and desperate for more.

The paper’s executive editor admitted as much during a closed-door meeting with dozens of Times’ reporters on August 11, after a somewhat positive front-page headline about the president enraged Times staff and readers.

The daily supply of Russian collusion dope dried up, but Trump-hating addicts don’t need rehab just yet: The Times is stocking up another toxic potion—white supremacy—to poison the body politic and cure any collusion withdrawal symptoms.

Pivoting to the failed effort to prove that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to sway the 2016 election, Dean Baquet confessed his news organization trafficked the collusion drug until it lost its potency.

“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think,” Baquet said during a “crisis town hall meeting” at the paper’s headquarters last week.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/19/stoking_racial_division_msnbc_does_the_dems_work_141036.html

The Democrats clearly don’t need to spend a dime on the 2020 presidential election campaign when they have almost the entire mainstream media doing free infomercials for them, and with just about the same level of authenticity and reliability as you would expect from those ads for Miss Cleo’s Psychic Friends Network.

It’s hard to know why the networks and cable news channels don’t have to declare their in-kind contributions to the Democratic Party when it is so obvious that their No. 1 goal is getting Donald Trump out of office. You can’t really blame the First Amendment because neither you nor I can make unlimited donations to the candidate of our choice or else it’s called (cue the scary music here) “daarrrrrrk money.” Our political speech is not protected by the First Amendment, so neither should the blatantly biased political speech of phony journalists who are less interested in reporting facts than expressing outrage.

Take this example from last week on MSNBC:

“If it’s Tuesday: Divide and conquer. The White House offers up a few changes to the famous Statue of Liberty poem about immigrants, putting the spotlight once again on the president’s campaign to stoke racial division.”

No. If it’s Tuesday, it’s Kasie Hunt making up stuff on “MTP Daily” to hurt President Trump because Chuck Todd is too busy stroking his own ego to do the job. There, I fixed it.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/13/a-week-in-the-life-of-abc-news/

ABC Nightly News,” televised daily across the nation at 5:30 p.m., offers what is perhaps the lowest common denominator of the mainstream media’s liberal, anti-Trump bias. But even if you compare what ABC has to say to what actually constitutes balanced reporting, as well as to what qualifies as newsworthy reporting, ABC falls short.

By these standards—by what used to be the basic editorial criteria for good journalism—ABC “news” is a dangerous fraud. They spew propaganda, calibrated at an almost infantile level, calculated to reinforce carefully nurtured biases within their television audience.

ABC News is anchored by the dashing metrosexual, David Muir, an actor of extraordinary skill. Muir, along with a laudably diverse collection of equally telegenic thespians masquerading as “journalists,” manages to exude convincing gravitas despite delivering, night after night, an embarrassing infotainment sham, mixing in equal parts pablum and agenda-driven propaganda. Forget about the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, or the Edward R. Murrow Award. Give David Muir an Oscar.

ABC’s nightly “news” is easily dissected. Their 30-minute formula, which all three legacy networks follow, consists of a prolonged opening segment, about 15 minutes in length, in which the  top national and international stories are presented (or so they tell us). An examination of what they reported on last week, during the five days from August 5 through August 9, provides ample evidence of just how far removed they are from genuine journalism.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/12/jeffrey-epstein-and-the-death-of-trust/

The reaction to the news Saturday morning that sex-trafficker-to-the-stars Jeffrey Epstein reportedly had committed suicide while in federal custody was nearly universal: No one was buying the “official” story.

Hashtags about the Clintons’ suspected culpability in Epstein’s death immediately dominated social media. People who had predicted Epstein would be dead before he faced trial felt vindicated. Suspicions about the “official line” on Epstein’s suicide were bipartisan. Trump foes on the Left, eager to pin the death on the president and his attorney general, proffered their own skepticism about what happened Saturday at a federal prison in Manhattan: “You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see an evil coverup to protect lots of powerful men here. You’d have to be bizarrely naive not to,” tweeted Harvard law professor and Trump hater Laurence Tribe.

Politicians from both sides of the political aisle, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), demanded an investigation into what happened. The convoluted tale of how Epstein got away with his vile crimes took another final, dark twist.

Independent-minded pundits along with millions of American posed the same questions: Why was Epstein not on suicide watch? How did such a high-profile accused criminal who had attempted to kill himself a few weeks ago have access to any contraband that would facilitate his suicide wish? Did someone get to him in prison, or was someone bought off to turn the other way while Epstein tried to end his own life?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stupid-news/

EXCERPTS

“Fake news!” shouts the president. His supporters cheer.

That drives my colleagues into a frenzy of self-absorbed handwringing: “Threats to press freedom … press persecution!”

It’s silly. American reporters are hardly less safe because of President Donald Trump’s hyperbole…..

But I smiled when I first heard him use the phrase, not because news stories are “fake”– they typically aren’t (reporters who make things up are usually caught and fired) — but because so much of what people call “news” is press releases and breathless exaggerations of isolated problems.

It’s stupid news.

“…… why do media mostly ignore more important events like the creation of cellphones and Google or how millions have lifted themselves out of poverty?One reason is because they happen gradually. When Facebook was being invented, few reporters noticed.

Another is because the big stories happen in more than one place. We reporters are good at covering plane crashes and murder. We can easily interview the official in charge.

But the biggest news, like changing attitudes about gender, happens all over the place.

When I graduated, 60% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Now, fewer than 9% do. Globally, that’s probably the most life-changing event over the past 50 years — a great victory, made possible by freer markets.

But most reporters don’t like free markets, and politicians rarely talk about change they don’t control.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/don-lemon-demonizes-black-pastor-who-wont-call-trump-racist/

CNN Tonight
✔ @CNNTonight

“President Trump does not attack people because of color. He attacks anybody he feels need it.” – Rev. Bill Owens says Trump’s meeting with African American pastors was not an attempt to insulate himself from his recent attacks on Rep. Cummings and his Baltimore district.”

On Tuesday evening, CNN’s Don Lemon spoke with Rev. Bill Owens, founder of the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP). Owens had met with Trump earlier that day. Yet it quickly became clear Lemon had no intention of learning anything about the meeting. Lemon, seemingly obsessed with Trump’s recent tweets attacking Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), pressured the pastor to talk about the Cummings tweets, something Owens considered irrelevant. After Owens resolutely refused to condemn Trump as a racist, Lemon launched into personal attacks against him.

“What did the president say about his attacks against these leaders of color and did any of the faith leaders raise concerns about that?” Lemon began.

“Well, I think something was said in passing. I don’t tune in to negative talk from any side,” Owens responded. “I took the position that we as black pastors should go down to Baltimore and see what we can do to help.” He said he grew up “in a two-room house, no water, no lights … so I know poverty.”

Yet again, the CNN anchor asked, “Did anybody there raise concerns about what he has been saying lately about people like Elijah Cummings or anyone?”

“Well, that was not the purpose of the meeting today. Today, the meeting was how can we help the black community. That is my concern and that was the purpose of the meeting. That was the reason I came to Washington and that is my focus: helping our inner-city young people especially, our children, our young people,” the pastor replied.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/social-medias-transition-from-novelty-to-malignancy/

Once Facebook escaped the cloistered world of mere campus life, it’s all been downhill—unless of course, you are one of those who invested in or went to work for the company early on. The company has endured a year of data breaches; privacy scandals; mismanagement; controversy over whether the company responded responsibly to the posting of a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi; and, finally, the largest fine ever imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, a whopping $5 billion. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has delivered seemingly endless public mea culpas and pledges to do better.

How did we get here? What made sense as a communications vehicle for a diverse but circumscribed group of people sharing many life experiences on campus and later as a helpful tool for the larger world, has transformed benign to malignant as fast as rapidly improving technology could take it there.

Students moved off the campus into the “real world,” taking Facebook with them. In those early days of social media, many Facebook competitors failed because they had developed neither the necessary campus constituency nor the needed degree of habituation among users, prior to graduation. In any case, as the graduates’ life experiences diverged, the nature of the communications was able to evolve along with them on Facebook.