RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/buzzfeed-death-spiral-the-millennial-readers-digest/

Which Pandering And Meretricious Yet Doomed Advertorial Dungbot Are You? Take The Quiz!

At its peak in the 1970s, Reader’s Digest pleased America like no other publication ever, selling 17 million copies a month while leaving no footprint whatsoever. It was invisible yet ubiquitous. Sure, it carried (often condensed) versions of real news stories written by fancy reporters for respected outlets, but that wasn’t why America adored it. Mainly it was defined by its periphery, its ephemera. Reader’s Digest was the mild, studiously inoffensive little nuggets of japery that readers sent in. The heartwarming stories about men in uniform, pets, kids. The “service journalism” — tips for soothing your aches or bringing harmony to your bank account. The patriotism, the Christmas miracles, the ironclad Frank Capra optimism. You’d see desiccated copies in your dentist’s waiting room or on Grandma’s coffee table. The product wasn’t quite junk food, merely the gentlest possible level of mental stimulation for the lowest common denominator. It was literary meatloaf.

Now picture the Reader’s Digest ethos reborn in 2006. What if you were willing to endure any amount of ridicule, contempt, dismissal, and eye-rolling in pursuit of the largest conceivable audience? What if your highest aspiration was the lowest common denominator? Keep in mind that the public had lost interest in paying for even moderately high-quality journalism, must less replacement-level journalism, much less the LCD variety. And all of the Gladyses were gone.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-new-york-times-roger-cohen-declares-himself-a-european-patriot/

In larger and larger numbers, Western Europeans are repudiating their subordination to Brussels. In Italy, this reaction has led to the installment of a government that is distinctly antagonistic to the European Union and, in particular, to its migrant-settlement directives. The United Kingdom, in accordance with the results of its 2016 plebiscite, is struggling to extricate itself from the EU. Elsewhere in Western Europe, politicians who reject the EU’s immigration tyranny are gaining support; in several nations of Eastern Europe, the heads of state, with strong public backing, are resisting EU demands that they take in armies of so-called migrants of the sort that are overrunning Western Europe. In May, elections for the European Parliament will take place across the continent. And at least some of the EU’s champions are unsettled.

I wrote the other day about one consequence of their concern: an open letter written by France’s most famous philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by a glittering roster of celebrity “intellectuals” who fretted that anti-EU forces will win big at the ballot box in May. “Europe as an idea,” warned Lévy, “is falling apart before our eyes.” Highbrows like himself, he maintained, are fighting “a new battle for civilization” — a concept that, in his mind, is more or less synonymous with the European Union.

As if by design, Lévy’s open letter — which was signed by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwen, and Milan Kundera, and was published prominently in several European newspapers — appeared on the very same day, January 25, as a piece by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen that made the same point. Entitled “Why I Am a European Patriot,” Cohen’s piece was more personal and passionate than usual. Here’s the key passage:

I am a European patriot because I have lived in Germany and seen how the idea of Europe provided salvation to postwar Germans; because I have lived in Italy and seen how the European Union anchored the country in the West when the communist temptation was strong; because I have lived in Belgium and seen what painstaking steps NATO and the European Union took to forge a Europe that is whole and free; because I have lived in France and seen how Europe gave the French a new avenue for expressing their universal message of human dignity; because I have lived in Britain and seen how Europe broadened the post-imperial British psyche and, more recently, to what impasse little-England insularity leads …

What to say about this? Well, it’s a perfect summary of elite opinion on the topic. But it’s sheer nonsense. CONTINUE AT SITE

The news, printed and online is full of lies and the corrections come after opinions have been altered and bias implemented.

I think it is high time to create an award for those institutions and journalist prevaricators who write and disseminate fake news.

How about having the Apate awards? In Greek mythology, Apate was the goddess of deceit and fraud. And just to keep it genderally correct we could couple it with the Dolos award. Dolos is the Greek god of trickery, cunning deception, craftiness, treachery and guile. His Roman equivalent is Mendacious.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/bad-press/How the media fail

Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable, morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen. “You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty.

It’s getting worse. Despite presenting an opportunity for sobriety and excellence, the election of President Donald Trump has been an unmitigated disaster for the political media, which have never reckoned with their role in Trump’s elevation and eventual selection, and which have subsequently treated his presidency as a rolling opportunity for high-octane drama, smug self-aggrandizement, and habitual sloth. I did not go to journalism school, but I find it hard to believe that even the least prestigious among those institutions teaches that the correct way to respond to explosive, unsourced reports that just happen to match your political priors is to shout “Boom” or “Bombshell” or “Big if true” and then to set about spreading those reports around the world without so much as a cursory investigation into the details. And yet, in the Trump era, this has become the modus operandi of all but the hardest-nosed scribblers.

The pattern is now drearily familiar. First, a poorly attributed story will break — say, “Source: Donald Trump Killed Leon Trotsky Back in 1940.” Next, thousands of blue-check journalists, with hundreds of millions of followers between them, will send it around Twitter before they have read beyond the headline. In response to this, the cable networks will start chattering, with the excuse that, “true or not, this is going to be a big story today,” while the major newspapers will run stories that confirm the existence of the original claim but not its veracity — and, if Representative Schiff is awake, they will note that “Democrats say this must be investigated.” These signal-boosting measures will be quickly followed by “Perspective” pieces that assume the original story is true and, worse, seek to draw “broader lessons” from it. In the New York Times this might be “The Long History of Queens Residents’ Assassinating Socialist Intellectuals”; in the Washington Post, “Toxic Capitalism: How America’s Red Hatred Explains Our Politics Today”; in The New Yorker, “I’ve Been to Mexico and Was Killed by a Pickaxe to the Head”; in Cosmopolitan, “The Specifics Don’t Matter, Men Are Guilty of Genocide.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/soros_the_nyt_and_antiisrael_propaganda.html

Using the pretext of commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the New York Times Sunday Review published what Alan Dershowitz fittingly described as, “one of the most biased, one-sided, historically inaccurate, ignorant and bigoted articles ever published by that venerable newspaper.” The article, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine”, is an unhinged anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian rant. The newspaper and the article were aptly criticized by Ruth King in the American Thinker, and by Ira Stoll in the Algemeiner.

However, vitriolic smears against Israel are nothing new to the NYT. What is new about this slanted article is that it shows how George Soros’s propaganda machine works.

The essay’s author Michelle Alexander served as “a Soros Justice Fellow” in 2005. She was among of first recipients of the Soros Justice program, with a stipend of $35,000 to $97,000, “to complete a book called The New Jim Crow… about the so-called war on drugs and mass incarceration as the defining racial justice issues of our time.”

Since then, Alexander has been affiliated with numerous Soros-funded organizations, such as The Ella Baker Center for Hunan Rights, which promote “color Justice”, “nationally organize and coordinate demonstrations for illegal-alien amnesty and manage voter-registration campaigns for Democratic candidates.”