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MEDIA

The New York Times Does “What Went Wrong In Venezuela?”Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

In the past couple of weeks, the New York Times has had two big articles about Venezuela, describing the horrific conditions that now exist there, and analyzing what went wrong. On May 14, it was “How Venezuela Stumbled to the Brink of Collapse”; and on May 17 it was “Venezuela’s Collapse Is the Worst Outside of War in Decades, Economists Say.”

It will not surprise you that the word “socialism” does not appear in either article. But the stupidity here goes far beyond just not mentioning the subject of “socialism.” The affirmative effort in these articles is to somehow shift the blame for Venezuela’s economic collapse to something other than socialism, whether it be “poor governance,” corruption, or general incompetence. The May 17 piece does have a reference to “misguided policies,” but they never say what those “misguided policies” may be. Widespread nationalizations of industry? Massive public housing schemes? Heavily subsidized food and household products? “Free” healthcare? None of these are mentioned.

But of course they do mention — multiple times — the Trump administration’s sanctions, just imposed in the past couple of months, as if those have something meaningful to do with a 60-80% collapse of GDP that has taken place over a decade or more.

From a summary in the May 17 piece:

Venezuela, at one point Latin America’s wealthiest country, has not been shattered by armed conflict. Instead, economists say, the poor governance, corruption and misguided policies of President Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have fueled runaway inflation, shuttered businesses and brought the country to its knees. And in recent months, the Trump administration has imposed stiff sanctions to try to cripple it further.

Why is The New York Times Trying to Abort the Trump Peace Plan? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14264/new-york-times-trump-peace

No one ever lost money betting against peace between Israelis and Palestinians…. It would be far better if The New York Times waited until the plan was released and then commented on its specific provisions rather than stacking the deck against it by quoting only its most strident critics.

There are those who will criticize any plan, no matter how positive it may be, if it emanates from the Trump administration. When President Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, many Democrats who would have favored such moves if they had been done by Barack Obama, opposed them only because these same moves were done by President Trump. These Democrats do not want to see Trump succeed at anything, even if his success would be good for America, for Israel and for peace.

If the editors of The New York Times refuse to separate opinion and analysis from hard reporting, every reader has an obligation to make that separation for herself or himself. Bear this in mind when you read The New York Times.

The New York Times seems determined to kill the proposed Trump Middle East peace plan before it is even made public. In a recent article, it quoted only nay-sayers and critics, who without having even seen the plan have declared its demise. In the guise of news, the Times provided “analysis” in the news section, which was, in reality, an editorial. This has become more and more common on the news pages of The New York Times. The separation of news from opinion is in the highest tradition of journalism, but The New York Times seems determined to knock down that wall of separation, especially when it comes to subjects on which its editors and publishers have strong opinions. Among these subjects are both Israel, which can do no right, and Donald Trump, who is always wrong. When these two subjects come together, as they do with regard to the Trump peace plan, readers must be wary of accepting news reports as objective.

Every single expert quoted in the article predicted that it would not succeed. Many of these experts have been involved in past unsuccessful efforts to bring about a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not surprising that these experts would not want to see others succeed where they have failed, especially if those others were members of the Trump administration. Then one expert went so far as to say: “The only way to protect the long-term viability of the best aspects of the Kushner plan,” he wrote, “is to kill the plan.”

Continuing plunge of CNN, MSNBC ratings reveals that fake news is a bad business strategy By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/continuing_plunge_of_cnn_msnbc_ratings_reveals_that_fake_news_is_a_bad_business_strategy_.html

The catastrophic ratings decline for both CNN and MSNBC was no temporary blip following publication of the Mueller report. Both cable news outlets had heavily promoted the hoax of Russian collusion with the Trump administration, teasing the hopes of Trump-haters for impeachment and prosecution for treason. Now, those disappointed viewers have gone away, and continue to stay away.

TV Newser (free registration required) reveals the continuing loss of a substantial portion of the viewership for both cable news networks in the third week of May:

CNN experienced its lowest-rated week since November 2015 in the 25-54 demo. Additionally, MSNBC marked its lowest-rated prime time week of the year in the demo. Rachel Maddow delivered her lowest-rated week of the year in both total viewers and the 25-54 demo.

The most dramatic decline was in the prized demo, age 25 – 54, with MSNBC down 42% and CNN down 43%. Advertisers are getting barely more than half as many potential consumers watching their ads in both cable news outlets.

To be fair, last year was an election year, and Fox News also experienced a decline of 22%, but that is roughly half the decline of the two progressive outlets.

Fox News lost the crown of the most-viewed cable channel to ESPN, which benefitted from the NBA playoffs.

Al Jazeera Pulls Video Claiming Holocaust Was ‘Different From How the Jews Tell It’

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/al-jazeera-pulls-video-claiming-holocaust-was-different-from-how-the-jews-tell-it-1.7255111

Video posted to AJ+ Arabic’s social media pages says Jews skewed Holocaust facts and statistics to get reparations from Germany, and that the establishment of Israel was derived from Nazi ideology.

Al-Jazeera’s AJ+ Arabic channel pulled a video it posted to its social media channels Friday night that claimed Jews exploit the Holocaust and that Israel is the genocide’s “greatest beneficiary.”The seven minute-long, Arabic-language video asserted that though the Holocaust did occur, “it’s different from how the Jews tell it,” Israeli media reported.

AJ+ Arabic, the youth-focused, online current-events channel of Qatar’s official Al Jazeera Media Network, posted the video on its social media platforms with the caption “The gas chambers killed millions of Jews…So the story says. How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?”Before its removal from the platforms on Saturday, the post reportedly gained 1.1 million views on Facebook and Twitter. After it was deleted, Al Jazeera said the piece violated the network’s editorial standards.

Notes on the Great Realignment By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/18/notes-on-the-great-realignment/

One of these days, I would like to cadge an invitation to a strategy meeting of #TheResistance. Not the pussy-behatted feminoid Hollywood chapter of #TheResistance. Nothing could be more boring, or more depressing, than that.But I would like to get a glimpse into the engine room of the more-moral-than-thou rancid-Right confraternity.

How are their troops dispatched? Whence do they receive their marching orders? Is it via the internet, or from some even more deliquescent medium of communication, that Pete Wehner and Parson David French and the rest of that fraternity receive the codebook of this week’s virtue signaling? I sometimes imagine Bill Kristol reposed among the debris of his machinations, like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” muttering terrible imprecations to his mesmerized if batty acolytes.

I’ll probably never know, but it’s clear that they do employ some effective means of getting the message out. I was reminded of this over the last couple of days when I noticed that Anne Applebaum, Max Boot, and Gabriel Schoenfeld all showed up with essentially the same homework assignment.

Applebaum, writing for the Orange-Man-Bad Post, weighed in with a column taking the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to task for “overt racism and covert anti-Semitism,” for mounting “an all-out assault on his country’s legal and judicial institutions, on independent media, on academia and on culture,” and for supporting Christianity against “the Muslim hordes (who don’t exist).”

The Media at Their LowestBy R. Quinn Kennedy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/the_media_at_their_lowest.html

When Joe Biden claimed this week on The View (see it here) that the Obama administration “had not a whisper of scandal” during eight years in the White House, the audience cheered wildly. And why wouldn’t it? It’s a partisan crowd that overwhelmingly leans left.

Those of us on quite the other side of the aisle didn’t bother falling out of our chairs at such an absurd claim. We know how the game is played: make sure that statements such as this from Democrats are played in front of a partisan audience on a biased show that isn’t about to challenge the assertion.

As a reminder for candidate Biden, let’s review a partial list of the dozens of scandals and all the corruption during the Obama administration:

IRS targeting of conservative 501(c)(3) nonprofits
The $500-million Solyndra scam admitted to by secretary of energy Steven Chu
Attorney General Eric Holder held in contempt for lying to Congress
Mass domestic spying by the NSA
Illegal DOJ investigations of journalists
Complete mismanagement of the war in Syria
Transferring $1.7 billion in cash to Iran
The Benghazi cover-up
Operation Fast & Furious
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s pay-for-play scam with foreign governments
Falsified Veterans Administration documents after patients died waiting to be seen

Bad think, banned think…..Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/

Eleven years ago, back in 2008, the blog Creeping Sharia was launched on the WordPress platform, the same publishing system used by Quadrant Online. On Sunday, May 12, an item was published that went entirely unreported by the Australian press and received only fleeting attention from mainstream US media: FBI agents had raided and made arrests at a compound in backwoods Alabama allegedly being used as a training centre by an Islamist cell said to have been planning to use small children as human bombs.

It would be the last item ever published on that site, as the following day its operators were informed by WordPress that permission to continue publishing on the blogging platform had been withdrawn for ever. Creeping Sharia had earlier been alerted by both Twitter and WordPress that its recent reproduction of the Charlie Hebdo cartoon below “violated Pakistan’s laws”. Yes, the laws of Pakistan, where a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, spent ten years with a death sentence hanging over her head after her Muslim neighbours accused her of “insulting the Prophet”. Now safe in Canada, the Toronto Sun reports an imam has vowed to track her down and deliver the Prophet’s brand of summary justice.

NYU Journalism Teacher: The GOP Is ‘A Terrorist Organization’ By Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/nyu-journalism-teacher-the-gop-is-a-terrorist-organization/

She seems nice.

No stranger to controversy, the 28-year-old Fordham grad and author of How to Start a Revolution tweeted last year on the death of evangelist Billy Graham, “The big news today is that Billy Graham was still alive this whole time. Anyway, have fun in hell, bi*ch.”

Controversy, vindictiveness masquerading as commentary, potato, poTAHto.

Me, I’m with Twitter user “VillainsMatter” who replied, “You know this whole acting like a complete asylum inmate bit, people look at it and vote trump 2020 because of it.”

This summer, Duca will teach a class at NYU called “The Feminist Journalist.” According to Wikipedia, the class will “focus on intersections of feminist ideology and the practice of journalism.” If Duca’s work is any indication, feminism and journalism — at least as journalism was once practiced — make up a Venn Diagram of two circles with zero overlap. That NYU finds someone so viciously partisan worthy of training tomorrow’s journalists tells you everything you need to know about the actual worth of an NYU journalism degree.

Frances Fox Piven, Icon Of The Left: Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-5-13-frances-fox-piven-icon-of-the-left

In the New York Times, they have a section that goes by the name “New York” on weekdays and “Metropolitan” on Sundays. This section contains next to no useful information about what is going on in New York and/or the surrounding area. Even local news staples like murders and fires rarely get covered. And if you want to learn about the latest corruption in City government, or important new laws coming out of the state legislature, you mostly have to look elsewhere.

But they have to fill the space with something. A fair characterization of the large part of it would be “support for our team.” To illustrate, yesterday’s “Metropolitan” section was totally dominated by a single article that contained nothing about relevant local news. Instead, it was, to put it mildly, a fawning profile of a woman named Frances Fox Piven. The headline was “This 86-Year-Old Radical May Save (or Sink) the Democrats.”

Have you heard of Frances Fox Piven? She first came to my attention way back in the 1960s, when she had become one of the early enlistees in the “War on Poverty,” and went around leading loud welfare “rights” demonstrations. She’s been doing variations of the same ever since. But I can’t say that I have closely followed her career. This Times profile fills in many details, and in the process makes clear that Ms. Piven is a true archetype of the species sometimes known as the Upper West Side progressive radical. I thought that readers here might like an introduction.

Here is how the Times chooses to introduce its piece:

Tulsi Gabbard Becomes First 2020 Dem to Speak Out against Facebook Censorship By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-becomes-first-2020-dem-to-speak-out-against-facebook-censorship/During a recent appearance on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) became the first and only Democratic presidential contender to voice opposition to the censorship of Facebook users.

During the interview, Gabbard split with fellow Democrats — many of whom have cast conservative concerns about tech censorship as a “conspiracy theory” — arguing instead that companies like Facebook have betrayed the longstanding American commitment to free expression by ousting unpopular political commentary from their platforms.

“There’s just been news recently about Facebook banning certain individuals . . . because of their speech. They disagree with the speech they’re using or the ideas they’re pushing forward. Unchecked, First Amendment rights going out the window,” she said, referring to Facebook’s recent purge of users on the political fringes such as Infowars reporter Paul Joseph Watson and notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

“The argument is [the First Amendment] doesn’t apply because they’re a private company, right?” Rogan responded.

“Yes, but they re trying to get the best of both worlds. The fact that they are claiming to say, ‘Hey, this is a free space for open communication for everyone’ while at the same time saying ‘You know, what Joe, I don’t like what you’re saying about this, so we’re going to ban you and whoever your friends are from this conversation’ — I think that’s a big problem.”