RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-shameful-season-for-american-journalism-1537830679

Ian Buruma was forced out last week as editor of the New York Review of Books after publishing an essay by a man who admitted that he has abused women. Mr. Buruma’s sudden departure caps a shameful season of American journalism.

In July, the Nation apologized for a poem for the first time in its 153-year history. In August, the New Yorker canceled a conversation at its annual festival between editor David Remnick and former White House aide Steve Bannon. All three publications were responding to outrage that they had dared provide a platform for views—or people—seen by a certain segment of the population as offensive, even dangerous.

The U.S. is deeply polarized, with divisions over race, class and sexuality widening under a president who exploits them. Social media brings out the worst in us. But good journalism has traditionally helped society find balance in unsettled times by giving voice to all sides of the debate, by helping people talk through their differences and seek compromise.

These three august institutions failed to do that. To put it plainly: They caved in.

In “How-To,” the poem published by the Nation, a street hustler offers advice on how to panhandle. The use of dialect suggests that the hustler is black, drawing complaints that the poem is racist. Because the hustler suggests faking a disability, it was condemned as “ableist.” The poet, Anders Carlson-Wee, who is white, was also accused of “cultural appropriation.” “We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” wrote the magazine’s poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Gimenez Smith. They said they were “revising our process for solicited and unsolicited submissions.” The New Yorker’s change of heart occurred after many liberals expressed outrage that Mr. Bannon had been invited to its festival and several celebrity speakers threatened to withdraw.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/peter-schweizer-google-and-facebook-brought-ag-anti-trust-meeting-on-themselves/

On Tuesday, state attorneys general met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions to discuss strategies to rein in Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook, using anti-trust laws. The team behind “The Creepy Line,” a new documentary about Big Tech, praised the meeting as vital, and argued that Google and Facebook brought this meeting on themselves.

“Google and Facebook have brought this meeting between the Department of Justice and several attorneys general on themselves,” New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer, writer and producer of “The Creepy Line,” said in a statement Tuesday. “With documented bias that has harmed consumers, Google’s abuse of the public trust has impacted users of all political stripes, and the recent leaked emails show them considering putting their finger on the scale on important national debates.”

Schweizer was referring to one email revealing a Google executive bragging about helping to increase the Latino vote, assuming Latinos would vote for Hillary Clinton, and another series of emails showing Google employees scheming about how to tweak he search engine function to harm Trump’s travel ban.

“Because of these documented problems, Google, Facebook, and other Internet platforms warrant closer scrutiny from government and non-government organizations,” Schweizer declared.

He further warned about an earlier leaked video in which “Google leadership and employees expressed their desire to use their platform to ‘spread our company’s values.’ With control over 90% of searches, they have the ability to do it.”

Finally, Schweizer cited the work of Ph.D. psychologist Robert Epstein, revealing that “Google and Facebook have the ability to manipulate and bias the information we see without us even knowing it. This is not only creepy, it’s dangerous. And, it’s time all of us took a closer look at these companies, their capabilities, and their goals.”

Epstein, senior research psychologist at the nonpartisan American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and author of 15 books and more than 300 articles on Internet influence and other topics, also emphasized the importance of the meeting.

“Randomized, controlled, peer-reviewed research I have been conducting since 2013 has repeatedly demonstrated the unprecedented power that Big Tech companies — Google, in particular — have to shift opinions and votes on a massive scale,” Epstein said in a statement. “My research suggests, for example, that Big Tech companies can shift upwards of 12 million votes in the November, 2018, election without people knowing they are being manipulated.”

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/quick-roundup-of-the-latest-anti-kavanaugh-lunacy/

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think the unbiased liberal media can’t find any proof for the stuff they really want to believe. But hey, rumor and innuendo and wild conjecture will do in a pinch. Who cares? It’s not as if Kavanaugh was nominated by a Democrat.”

Sorry to turn my humble blog into All Kavanaugh All the Time, but I have a keen interest in liberal insanity, and right now this story is where all the action is.

All this stuff is happening really fast, and it’s only going to get crazier until Christine Blasey Ford fails to appear testifies before the Senate on Thursday. We already know that Brett Kavanaugh is probably a rapist because a couple of women have made completely unsupported accusations against him. But wait, there’s more! Here’s the latest proof that he’s probably a rapist, and even if not, he still stinks:

Exhibit A: Kavanaugh claims he was a virgin in high school, as if that exonerates him from rape.

On Monday Kavanaugh was interviewed by Martha MacCallum from Fox News (boo, hiss!), and he defended himself from a very serious claim by not-a-creepy-porn-lawyer Michael Avenatti. The claim is that Kavanaugh participated in a gang rape ring in high school. That sounds plausible, right? Kavanaugh’s rebuttal is that he was a virgin in high school, and for quite some time after. So I can add that to my list of Things I Didn’t Particularly Want Nor Need to Know.

But Kavanaugh’s claim of youthful sexlessness may have been a fatal mistake! It has now been thoroughly debunked by, um, a tweet from a guy who claims to have gone to Yale with him:
Steve Kantrowitz @skantrow

Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite.

I have questions.

How can a fact-checker ascertain whether a decades-old recollection of a college classmate’s sexual boast actually happened?
If somehow the fact of Kavanaugh’s boast is proven, via time travel or astral projection or some other unspecified means, how can a fact-checker determine if the boast was true or false?
How does any of this prove the so-far-unproven allegations against Kavanaugh?

I know, I know. I’m just nitpicking.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jane-meyer-accuser-told-ronan-farrow-she-wasnt-sure-of-story/

Jane Mayer said on Monday that Deborah Ramirez, who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually harassing her, told her New Yorker colleague Ronan Farrow that she couldn’t be sure of the Supreme Court nominee’s guilt.

Confronted with a New York Times report indicating Ramirez expressed doubts about Kavanaugh’s guilt to former Yale classmates, Mayer said Ramirez shared those doubts before they published their bombshell report on Sunday.

“To Ronan she said she wasn’t absolutely certain, she needed to make certain before she was going to say anything publicly. She remembered the specifics, the graphic specifics, and she tried to remember for sure who that man was who was in her face,” she told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.“With all due respect to the New York Times, which is the best paper in America, just because they couldn’t get the story and speak to her or find the person that we found, who remembered it from back then, doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Ramirez, who opted to come forward after learning Senate Democrats were independently investigating the incident, claims Kavanaugh drunkenly thrust his penis in her face during a dorm party at Yale when he was a freshman.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-the-new-yorkers-grossly-irresponsible-story/

Judge Kavanaugh labels The New Yorker’s report a “smear, plain and simple.” He should be applauded for his restraint. I am struggling to remember reading a less responsible piece of “journalism” in a major outlet.

The piece starts out not with a summary of the story, but with the news that Democrats in Washington are taking it seriously — a weaselly attempt to pass the buck if I ever saw one (“People are saying!”). After that throat clearing, it is acknowledged that the person making the accusation around which the piece revolves had not mentioned it until Kavanaugh was nominated, “was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty,” and agreed to make the charge on the record only after she had spent “six days [] carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney.”

There are no corroborating witnesses. None. Of the “dozens” of classmates The New Yorker contacted, all either failed “to respond to interview requests . . . declined to comment, or said they did not attend or remember the party.” Indeed, we learn late in the piece that the authors could not establish that Kavanaugh was even there. “The New Yorker,” the tenth paragraph begins, “has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.” The only “evidence” provided comes from a “classmate” who was not at the party, but is certain he heard about the incident, and from “another classmate” who thinks he heard about an incident that could vaguely resemble the one alleged, but doesn’t know to whom it was done, or by whom. Or, as we would traditionally put it: The only proof provided is rumor.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/09/abc-witness-persecution/

Democrats sat on a fact-lite accusation of sexual assault against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh, then summoned US media allies for a last minute pile-on. From this melange of innuendo and pearl-clutching horror, the ABC’s Zoe Daniel extracted only the worst to ‘inform’ her Australian audience.

Zoe Daniel is the ABC’s Washington-based North America bureau chief. In other words, her ABC daily mission is to bash Trump using the Democrat storylines. She sometimes finds a storyline of her own, such as interviewing her own children, Arkie, 10, and Pearl, 8, when Trump was elected. That story began, “Donald Trump’s victory has provoked fear and concern for some children…”

Her ‘shocked’ Arkie thought Trump should be given a chance despite his alleged racism, sexism, assaults on gay people and Latinos, “and all those people who have done nothing in their life for Trump to hurt their feelings that way,” he continued, claiming to quote his primary-school pals. Pearl, who had switched from backing Bernie Sanders to Hillary, was convinced Trump was going to “kick out” Mexicans en bloc, including her Mexican school buddies, which would “just be mean”. Pearl found consolation and inspiration in Hillary’s concession speech.

To get inside the mind of Daniel mère, pull on the gumboots, as you’ll be wading in ABC progressive-left-liberal mush. For example, on Friday Daniel was writing on ABC News about embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, 53. “Can he really sit on the US Supreme Court dishing out morality now?” said the headline, under the ABC’s standing banners “Trump’s America” and “Planet America”. (There was never a standing ABC banner “Obama’s America”).

Scene-setting is that the minority Democrat senators want to delay Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court until the mid-term elections on November 6, when they might attain a majority and be in position to block’s Trump’s current pick and foil any further nominations of conservative jurists.[i] If the Democrats can’t block Kavanaugh appointment they face the prospect of a right-leaning SCOTUS for the next 30 years. Daniel speculates this could mean anti-abortion rulings.

The Republican majority could simply ram his appointment through. Instead, they are being fastidious about protocol (as is Trump in this case) to avert any female voting backlash over perceived disrespect to the sex-assault claimant, psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, 51, a registered Democrat and donor. She claimed, initially anonymously and this month on the record, that a drunken Kavanaugh groped and assaulted her at a school-brat party 35 years ago, about summer 1982, when she was about 15 and Kavanaugh 17.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/21/cnn-asked-five-women-if-they-believed-kavanaugh-cnn-didnt-like-their-answers/

CNN asked five Republican women if they believe Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s denial against an allegation of sexual assault. They all said yes.

The CNN reporter, Radni Kaye, kicked things off by asking them to raise their hands if they believe Kavanaugh. They all raised their hands

“In the grand scheme of things, my goodness, there was no intercourse, there was a touch,” Irina Vilarino, a GOP voter said. “Really? Thirty-six years later, she’s still stuck on that?”

“Why would she come forward if this wasn’t true?” Kaye asked. “Because this has basically destroyed her family. She’s had to move; she’s gone undercover; she’s gotten death threats. So if she’s lying, why come forward?”

“She’s also destroying his life, his wife’s life, his children’s lives, his career,” Vilarino said. “Why didn’t she come out sooner if she’s telling the truth?”

“Why didn’t she come out when he was going into the Bush White House?” Angie Vasquez said. “He’s been a federal judge for over a decade!

“Why not have a thorough investigation instead of just the two of them ‘he said, she said?” Kaye asked.

“Because it doesn’t matter!” another woman said.

“Do you have some sympathy for her for what she’s going through?”

“No,” Lourdes Castillo de la Peña responded. “I have no sympathy.”
Bre Payton is a staff writer at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271388/kavanaugh-desantis-and-human-cost-fake-news-daniel-greenfield

“Its fake news techniques rely on hearsay, implication, rumor, gossip, and innuendo. These techniques are rarely subject to the media’s fact checking. They don’t make definitive statements. Instead they misleadingly connect the dots into a blizzard of conspiracy theories that can never be pinned down. There’s no way to stop them, except by calling them what they are. Fake news.”

Politico, the media outlet of choice for flacks and hacks, has declared that Ron DeSantis, the conservative Republican running for Governor of Florida, against the media’s favorite new socialist, suffered his “fifth race-related” controversy.

That fifth “controversy” is about something that somebody who isn’t DeSantis tweeted. The fourth controversy also involved a DeSantis donor. The third controversy falsely smeared the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend attended by DeSantis (and Medal of Honor winner Clinton Romesha). The second involved a GOP official who also isn’t DeSantis. And the first was that DeSantis had been added without his knowledge to a Facebook group where other people said racist things.

And the media actually dares to get offended when people call it, ‘Fake News’.

What the five “race-related” scandals have in common is that none of them involve DeSantis. They’re all guilt by association. Even by the loosest possible association, a donor, a GOP official, someone on the same Facebook page or someone in Florida.

These fake news scandals aren’t being generated because there’s any basis to the racism smear. It’s a strategic campaign decision made because DeSantis’ opponent, Andrew Gillum, is African-American. Since Gillum is black, the Democrats decided to accuse DeSantis of racism. (If DeSantis were running against a woman, he would be accused of sexism.) And the media decided to advance the smear by inventing “race-related” scandals based on the flimsiest of premises to help the Democrats win.

The fake news template is to find somebody in Florida who said something controversial, then to demand that the DeSantis campaign disavow it. And presto, there’s another “race-related” controversy.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/17/media

After reviewing last week’s news coverage, I would encourage President Trump to come up with a more accurate taunt than “fake news.” Maybe “garbage news.” Or perhaps “bottom-feeding news.” Even try “we-are-a-collection-of-dishonest-miscreants-who-are-unworthy-of-an-ounce-of-the-American-people’s-trust news.”

But “fake news” is tame in light of the media’s misleading, destructive, and willfully ignorant reporting last week that was intended further to inflame a divided body politic.

Some of the lowlights featured MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough, claiming Trump has done more damage to the country than the 9/11 terrorists; the editorial board of a major newspaper blaming Trump for Hurricane Florence; the wholesale acceptance of a highly flawed paper about hurricane deaths used to bash the president; and a despicable crusade not just to quash Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, but to destroy his reputation and damage his young family.

And it wasn’t just the dependable lunatics on the Left pushing trash commentary. Bret Stephens, the NeverTrump “conservative” columnist for the New York Times, compared Trump to a drug addict. Washington Post “conservative” blogger Jennifer Rubin warned that if Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted to confirm Kavanaugh, their names would be, “as was the case with [Nazi-era traitor] Vidkun Quisling—synonymous with ‘sellouts,’ ‘collaborators,’ or, to use a Trumpism, ‘phonies.’”

As the week came to a close, the New York Times was forced to append its misleading article that criticized U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley for buying pricey curtains to decorate her official residence. The window coverings, it turns out, actually were purchased by her predecessor in the Obama Administration. But it was too late. Social media had pounded Haley all morning for being extravagant and heartless.

Disgraceful.