RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/11/joe_scarborough_hypocrite_138043.html

September 11 should not be about politics, nor about Donald Trump, and surely not about Joe Scarborough. Only 17 years separated from that incredibly painful day, the solemnity of our national remembrance should remain particularly poignant and reservedly reverent. After all, there are many thousands of still-school-aged young Americans who lost parents on that fateful day or in the global military struggle that followed.

But MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” callously used the calamity of 9/11 to take cheap political shots at President Trump, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that he “is harming America more than any foreign adversary every could” and declaring on-air that Trump presents a “graver threat” to America than the 2001 attacks did. Such hyperbole would be ridiculous and disqualifying coming from some anonymous troll on Twitter, but is jaw-dropping from a former congressman and prominent cable news morning host.

Imagine, for comparison, a major television host in the 1950s, like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, declaring that President Eisenhower presented a “graver” threat to America than Tojo and the Imperial Japanese Army did at Pearl Harbor?

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/a-modest-proposal-for-anonymous/

As a means of spreading mistrust, confusion and distraction within the Trump administration, last week’s New York Times op-ed by “Anonymous” was a master stroke. Vladimir Putin himself could hardly have done better. Suspicion is rife and the administration has been left to rummage through its own ranks for this incognito writer who claims and lauds subversion of the president by his own high-level staff. Relays of senior officials have been left to deny authorship, without being able to prove the truth of their denials unless the real author is discovered.

As Ambassador Nikki Haley accurately summed it up in a Sept. 7 op-ed in the Washington Post, this anonymous writer, described by the Times as “a senior official,” has sowed mistrust among thousands of government workers, who had nothing to do with this article. Anonymous has encouraged America’s adversaries to, as Haley puts it, “promote their hostile claims about the stability of our government,” and unfairly cast doubt on the president himself “in a way that cannot be directly refuted because the anonymous acccuser’s credibility and knowledge cannot be judged.”

The Times tells us this op-ed escapade required anonymity because the author, if identified, would be in jeopardy of losing a federal job. That alone suggests the Times is willing to vouch for an author with an odd set of priorities. But surely there’s more to it. The titillating use of “Anonymous” has brought a gush of extraordinary attention to the Times, and one might wonder if there will be special credit inhouse for anyone on its editorial staff who had a hand in ferrying the op-ed from the anonymous writer — this erstwhile conservative champion of “free minds, free markets and free people” — to the public page. While the contents of the op-ed brought nothing new to the rumor mills or furor of America’s political debate, the tease of anonymity, combined with the label of “senior official,” has become clickbait galore. In effect, the platform of a government job has been leveraged here to serve the personal agenda of an individual within the administration. When the medium for this sort of behavior is money, it’s called corruption.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/mawkish-hooey-thats-unfit-print/

The New York Times has long considered itself the acme of journalistic integrity and resolve. That self-serving appraisal was a stretch but, until Trump Derangement Syndrome set in, worth no more than a wry smile. An anonymous op-ed confirms how deep the malady has taken root.

So-called investigative reporters rely a lot, so far as I can tell, on anonymous sources. What then happens is that they file a story under their own name and earn the fame or bear the consequences depending on whether the story turns out to be true or false. There is now a more novel approach which cuts out the middleman. The anonymous source is given prime space in a mainstream newspaper to speak for himself, or is it herself, or is it, perhaps, someone in gender transition. Think of the traitorous Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning as an apt role model.

That some nameless person would be given space to write an op-ed in The New York Times is surely beyond extraordinary and unethical. A senior official in the Trump administration (so claims the newspaper) was given the opportunity on September 6 to spread dirt on Donald Trump behind a veil of anonymity. And vague, non-specific, dirt at that. Put yourself in Trump’s position. Put yourself in the position of anyone besmirched in general terms by Mr or Ms or Mx Anonymous. How do you effectively defend yourself?

Let me give you some quotes from the op-ed.

“Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” Note the ‘we’. No examples were provided of these misguided impulses; not one. Just suppose it is true for the sake of the argument. Have you ever had a misguided impulse? I have had too many to count. Luckily, I haven’t acted on absolutely all of them. But that is why it is a good idea for presidents, any leaders, to surround themselves with competent people. Does anyone think, for example, that Mike Pence, Generals Kelly and Mattis, Mike Pompeo and Steve Mnuchin are not competent.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/07/who-elected

“That is why, for the past decade, Americans have been doing all that can be done at the ballot box to shake this class off their backs. In 2016, Donald Trump was the likeliest instrument available for this. Today, we see this class rejecting the election’s outcome. The “resistance” has done so in practice. Anonymous’ idea of the “steady state” has now done so in theory as well. The Times’ and the Journal’s approbation of that theory attest to the sad fact that the revolution now ongoing among us has passed the point of no return.”

The New York Times’ Anonymous, proud to be saving the country from the president he is sworn to serve, dismisses fears of an unaccountable “deep state.” Rather, he argues, Americans should appreciate that, as he and other officials surreptitiously thwart President Trump’s inappropriate impulses, they are supplying a beneficent, steadying effect. He and other officials who share right thinking people’s judgments on Donald Trump are not the bad “deep state.” They are the good “steady state.”

Essentially that is the position of the Wall Street Journal as well. Without explicitly crediting Anonymous’s (un)specific claims of successful subversion or the specific ones that Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Fear, makes on behalf of Gary Cohn and Generals James Mattis and H. R. McMaster, the Journal’s lead editorial praised as “heroes” “the Mattises and McMasters, the Kudlows and Cohns, the McConnells and Ryans, who’ve worked for the good of the country amid the tumultuous personality in the Oval Office.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271265/trump-vs-sleeper-cell-op-ed-matthew-vadum

President Trump is absolutely right to be furious about the treacherous New York Times op-ed by a fifth-columnist in his administration trashing his leadership and portraying him as a feebleminded would-be dictator.

The essay titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” is vicious Trump-hating propaganda by a cowardly member of a sleeper cell in the White House. Nothing less. Nothing more.

This op-ed that has been dominating media coverage is a catalog of piddling complaints against a spectacularly successful Chief Executive who is easily the most conservative American president since Ronald Reagan.

It is part of what Michael Walsh some time ago termed a “rolling coup attempt” by those who refuse to accept the judgment the American people rendered on Election Day 2016. The same people who push the kooky, utterly unsubstantiated Trump-Russia electoral collusion conspiracy theory, are pushing this tripe.

The author is a traitor, if not to the country, certainly to this president who ought to be able to count on senior government officials – especially his own appointees – to help carry out his policies, not sabotage them.

Although the essay could easily have been written by almost any articulate backstabbing RINO or NeverTrumper inside the Beltway, the Times has referred to the author both as “a senior official in the Trump administration” and in an explainer as a “White House official.” There are, conceivably, thousands of individuals who could be considered senior officials in the Trump administration but there are maybe fewer than 400 individuals working in the White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/06/take-salena-zito

Intramural food fights about journalistic practices normally don’t attract my attention. The journalists I know, right and left, have their biases but are mostly honest and good at what they do. But the recent assault on Salena Zito’s integrity is different.

That’s because Zito’s reporting chops aren’t what’s really at issue. What’s really at stake is her narrative, that Trump’s victory was due to millions of fed-up, blue-collar Americans angry at coastal elite condescension and the failed policies that flowed from that conceit. Strike her down, and the most prominent advocate of that explanation for 2016 gets removed from the conversation—and with her, perhaps the narrative itself drops by the wayside.

See, NeverTrump resisters—Left and Right—still don’t want to admit this is why he won. They would prefer to chalk it up to Russian hacking or to misinformation, the political nerd’s version of Area 51 and Roswell. Or they contend it’s all a matter of latent racism, which somehow never expressed itself when Barack Obama twice won in these same areas or when two Hispanics and a black man won majorities of the votes in early GOP primaries and caucuses. Anything—anything—but that Americans who have different cultural interests than coastal or suburban college graduates were mad as hell and didn’t want to take it anymore.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/The-White-House-is-at-war-with-reporters-but-13199382.php

President Trump’s sustained war on the news media is loud and destructive and surely must be the worst, most unprecedented attack on the Fourth Estate in modern history.

Not so fast. On a few significant fronts, Trump is following a trail blazed by President Obama in undermining openness and press freedom. And Trump’s newfound willingness to use the Justice Department to surveil journalists and sniff out their sources is right out of the Obama playbook.

Meanwhile, the tweets keep coming. “If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all,” Trump tweeted recently.Since taking office, Trump has had only one, full-length press conference at the White House. His own legal and administrative headaches probably preclude a repeat performance any time soon.

Drawing the most attention are Trump’s darker pronouncements — journalists are “nasty,” they are “enemies of the people,” and maybe some should see their licenses revoked. Journalist Ken Vogel of the New York Times is one of several to receive chilling death threats, apparently from Trump supporters.

“You are the enemy of the people,” a caller said on voicemail shared by Vogel last week. “And although the pen might be mightier than the sword, the pen is not mightier than the AK-47.”

Trump recently escalated from trash-talk to legal action, deploying the Justice Department to seize without notice six years’ worth of email and phone records from four reporters in order to smoke out a source whose information reflected badly on Trump.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271221/iran-orders-7-journalists-flogged-media-yawns-daniel-greenfield

Remember all that media outrage over President Trump’s criticism of its fake news operation?

That’s the same media that is constantly doing unpaid ads for Iran’s nuclear program and its plot to take over Yemen (every story attacking US participation in the “Saudi coalition” and fake news claims about “atrocities” committed against the Shiite Jihadis of the Houthis).

The media claims that Trump’s criticism endangers it. Meanwhile it seems far less interested in Iran’s abuses of journalists.

Iranian courts in July and August sentenced at least six journalists affiliated with Majzooban-e-Noor, a news website that focuses on the Gonabadi Dervish religious order, and a journalist from the state-run outlet Ensaf, to prison terms of between seven and 26 years, and ordered them to be flogged publicly and forced into exile and banned from political and social media activities on their eventual releases, according to news reports and rights organizations.

“These horrifying sentences lay bare Iranian authorities’ depraved attitude toward journalists, as well as the hollow center of President Hassan Rouhani’s promises of reform,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour from Washington, D.C. “Iran should end its vicious campaign against journalists, and allow them to report freely.”

Imagine if the media covered this the way it fulminates over Trump’s criticisms of CNN. But of course it doesn’t. Its claims that it cares about journalism (and its even more bizarre claims that Trump’s criticisms endanger journalists abroad) have always been as fake as its news.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/you-are-not-going-to-believe-this-list-of-cnns-bungled-reporting/

Donald Trump has been on a tear against the media in recent days, calling out most major media outlets for “lies,” “fake news,” and “phony news.” But the president has reserved his worst venom for CNN, which has been caught in what he is calling a “lie” that the network won’t retract.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @carlbernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News

Last month, CNN reported based on anonymous sources that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was willing to testify that Mr. Trump knew in advance that Donald Trump Jr. was going to meet with Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton — a claim that the president and his son both vehemently deny.

However in the past week, one of the sources — Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis — admitted that he didn’t know that this was true, and his client told federal prosecutors under oath as part of a plea deal that he didn’t know that, either.

In addition, Mr. Davis was identified by name in CNN’s story as having no comment on the report — a lie given what he now says.

Seems pretty cut and dried. If Bernstein isn’t lying, why won’t he admit his error?

CNN has had plenty of other opportunities to admit they made mistakes. The Daily Caller compiled 20 of them:

CNN retracted a story in June of 2016 claiming that former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation by Congress for his alleged ties to Russia.

The story relied on one anonymous congressional source and CNN apologized to Scaramucci for the error. Three CNN reporters ended up resigning from the company over the botched report.