RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274246/twice-many-americans-have-confidence-police-media-daniel-greenfield

You might think that doesn’t mean much.

I have more confidence in your average schizophrenic homeless man screaming at ghosts than I do in the media. And you probably think I’m being too generous.

But the pattern here is that conservative institutions still tend to inspire more confidence than lefty ones.

Just three institutions — the military (73%), small business (68%) and the police (53%) — have garnered majority levels of confidence in all polls Gallup has conducted on each measure over the past two decades. The military has been the top-ranked institution or tied for the top-ranked institution each year since 1986.

Though 38% of Americans say they have confidence in the U.S. presidency, it is exceeded by the percentage of people who have very little or no confidence in this branch of government (44%), giving this institution a net-negative score.

Slightly more than a third of Americans also express confidence in the Supreme Court (38%), organized religion (36%) and the medical system (36%), while slightly less than a third have confidence in banks (30%), public schools (29%) and organized labor (29%).

Fewer than one in four Americans have confidence in the criminal justice system (24%), newspapers (23%) and big business (23%).

Americans have the least confidence in television news (18%) and Congress (11%). 

I wonder why.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/big-media-

Big Brother, in the person of President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was not persuaded by the findings of the Mueller investigation: “If there wasn’t active collusion proven, then I think what we have here is a case of passive collusion”. To put it another way, if President Trump is not guilty of being a Kremlin agent, in any technical, literal or actual sense, then he is still guilty. Former Director Clapper—along with former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director Comey—helped generate the Great Kremlin Conspiracy in the first place. Is there, then, a possibility that James Clapper might have a particular agenda in his strange response to the Mueller Report? Are we, perhaps, on the verge of uncovering one of the great scandals in American history, in which the intelligence agencies of the United States conspired to affect the course and consequences of a presidential election? Do not expect a media outfit such as CNN to take up the story—after all, James Clapper gave his reaction to the Mueller Report in his present capacity as CNN’s “National Security Analyst”. Big Media, regrettably, is no less invested in the Great Kremlin Conspiracy (2015–19) than Big Brother.   

Today, news and truth are like passing strangers. It was not supposed to be like this. The Walter Lippmann–John Dewey debate of the mid-twentieth century revolved around the question of whether the ordinary person could ever be expected to interpret meaningfully what was happening in the wider world. Dewey, in an optimistic liberal vein, believed it possible to educate Joe and Jane Citizen with the necessary wherewithal to be informed and insightful enough to make sense of the world for themselves. In contrast, Lippmann believed we were reliant on journalists and editors choosing objectivity over ideology and putting even-handedness before their own interests. That remains, however unlikely, freedom’s best hope.

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) was a sceptical—though not cynical—analysis of the problems of ordinary people exercising genuine democratic oversight of their governing class. The supposed purpose of the press and news media, as the Fourth Estate, was to make our political elite genuinely responsive to public opinion. This process, asserted Lippmann, was handicapped by the disjointedness and changeability of the untutored opinions of the public. There were, therefore, two interconnected problems that needed addressing for the health of a modern democracy. First, whatever the assertions of news agencies, facts invariably require interpretation (meaning anything from contextualisation to prioritisation or omission). Second, the modern world has become “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting” for the private citizen, bound by the limits of “subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental images”, to pursue meaningful interpretation without expert assistance. The role of the press and the news media, thus, was the “manufacture of public opinion”, an expression that in 1922 did not attract the opprobrium attached to it since the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s treatise on the mainstream media.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/ingraham-angle-promotes

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday June 10, 2019 hosted two so-called “reformist” Muslim women, Qanta Ahmed and Asra Nomani for a discussion of Christian persecution under Islam, which is a shameful, murderous pandemic. Neither woman could deal honestly with the Islamic, Sharia-based roots of this persecution, although certainly Ahmed was much more egregious in her dissimulation/ takiya. Hard data make plain “The Concordance of Sharia ‘Thirst’, Rampant Christian Persecution, and Jew-Hatred in Muslim Societies”. This juxtaposition reveals a striking concordance between Christian persecution by Muslims, the excess prevalence of extreme Antisemitic sentiments within Muslim societies, and Muslim attitudes favoring strict application of the Sharia.

Qanta Ahmed made these egregious pronouncements:

“It [Christian persecution] is also anathema to Islam that reveres Jesus [NO; he’s a Muslim prophet who destroys Christianity], that sees the Gospel as a holy book of God [No; deliberately corrupted version of the Koran]…Islam says everyone has a right to a free will, a right to reject Islam, to reject the truth of God [NO; per Koran 4:89, 2:217; 9:5; 9;29 & canonical hadith, “apostates” are to be killed; jihad to be waged to submit Jews & Christians to limited practice under Sharia jurisdiction if they survive]…So these Muslims are acting beyond the bounds”

She then goes on to extol Qatar for its alleged Catholic ecumenism, and the Kurds—chronic, mass murdering persecutors of Christians, past as prologue.

Asra Nomani was better, but her takiya can be almost as corrosive. She claimed mendaciously that Koran 1:7 is only hateful because of a “Wahhabi interpretation”. This verse in fact has a classical-cum-modern overwhelming (90%) interpretation across 13-centuries, Sunni and Shiite alike, I just carefully reviewed, and it curses the Jews for having incurred Allah’s anger [linking this verse to Koran 5:60, Jews as apes and pigs], and the Christians for having gone astray [linking Koran 1:7 to Koran 5:77]

Here is Asra Nomani, verbatim:

“Why is the cross under attack? It is because the Koran that I have here in the first chapter, the last sentence that we have [she means the Fatiha, Koran 1:6 to 1:7] , we say that we have to stay on the straight path [i.e., Islam] but [what] the Saudi interpretation and how governments like Qatar and Turkey have added is we have to stay on the straight path and not depart from it like the Jews and Christians have done They say that thinking of Jesus as a son of God is like polytheism and that is ultimately worse than murder they say. So that is why you have attacks on the symbol”