RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/first-amendment-donald-trump-journalist-attacks/

Describing Trump as uniquely antagonistic to the First Amendment among presidents is preposterous.

Members of the Fourth Estate, especially the TV reporters, have a curious view of the First Amendment. They seem to be under the impression that it says something like this:

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; nor shall any president troll Jim Acosta or describe Katy Tur as “little”; nor shall any president draw undue attention to honest errors committed by the press in their noble pursuit of speaking truth to power; nor shall any president say the New York Times or Washington Post are failing when they totally aren’t; nor shall any president fail to ensure White House briefings are televised to maximize exposure of journalists who have put a lot of work into their hair and makeup; nor shall any mouthpiece of any such president bestow undue prominence in said briefings to reporters from Newsmax or the Daily Caller; nor shall any president be unduly mean to the press in general.

Last night a prominent TV journalist posted a take on the First Amendment of such breathtaking inanity that it amounted to pundit malpractice. It was as if the doctor who does your annual checkup failed to notice you have a knife sticking out of your abdomen. It was as if the mechanic you hired to rotate your tires forgot to put several of them back on your car. Report to accept chastisement, Kasie Hunt, Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News: You said one of the dumbest things any Washington journalist has said in the Trump era, and that is saying something.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270549/politics-iconic-images-dawn-perlmutter

A photograph of crying two-year-old Yanela Sanchez became the iconic image of children being separated from their parents after crossing the border illegally. The photograph immediately went viral and was featured in international coverage around the world. Yanela Sanchez became the face of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy. The cover of the July 2, 2018 edition of Time Magazine depicted a photoshopped image of Yanela looking up at President Trump, with the heading “Welcome to America.” The crying toddler was also pictured on the June 16 cover of The New York Daily News with the headline: “Callous. Soulless. Craven. Trump.”

The image, taken by photographer John Moore of Getty Images, was immediately bestowed iconic status and designated the visible symbol of family separation in the ongoing immigration debate. Iconic photographs function as symbols of historical events, controversies, persons or locations and sometimes they are representative of an entire generation. Protests and war are popular themes of iconic photos because they capture heroic, tragic and significant incidents.

The primary criteria of iconic photographs are their emotional effect. There was no shortage of images of crying children at the border. What distinguished this photograph from others is that it depicted Sandra Sanchez, Yanela’ s mother, being patted down by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The image of a Border Patrol agent frisking a Honduran woman in front of her crying child was granted iconic status because it reinforces anti-police propaganda that portrays officers as inhumane, heartless, racist and violent. The image went viral because it evoked anti-police sentiment. Overt and subliminal messages work particularly well when they resonate with previously inculcated narratives. Continual negative media depictions of law enforcement have programmed public perception to interpret the image as a police officer terrorizing a child by harassing her mother.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270554/media-accuses-trump-its-own-crimes-daniel-greenfield

On Tom LoBianco’s LinkedIn profile, the former Associated Press reporter self-identifies as a “White House reporter covering Trump Russia probes.” At CNN, LoBianco writes that he “covered the 2016 presidential race and the Russia probes.”

Now LoBianco is in trouble for reasons having nothing and everything to do with the Russia probe.

Earlier this year, Elliot Broidy, a Trump ally and Republican fundraiser, was targeted by Qatari hackers. Broidy had been sharply critical of the terror state which has been linked to everything from 9/11 to Iran. And his emails were quickly peddled to media figures who spun them into pro-Qatari hit pieces.

When Broidy struck back with a lawsuit targeting Qatar and its lobbyists, phone records showed that LoBianco had spoken three dozen times to a registered foreign agent of the Islamic terror state.

LoBianco’s stories were nakedly hostile to Broidy, the Saudis and the UAE to the extent that they were hard to distinguish from Qatari propaganda. And they were aimed at what LoBianco and his collaborator deemed a “secret campaign” to “alter U.S. foreign policy and punish Qatar.” LoBianco’s story accused Broidy of not registering as a foreign agent, but he was the one allegedly colluding with a Qatari agent.

In his story, LoBianco wrote of a “cache of emails obtained by the AP.” The emails are described as having been “anonymously leaked.” A more factually accurate term would have been “hacked” or “stolen.” And LoBianco and the AP had no problem with posting these stolen emails online.

There was nothing unusual about that. Media organizations routinely publish stolen emails while describing them as ‘leaked’: a term associated with classified government or corporate documents, not stolen private correspondence. Like LoBianco’s stories, they emphasize the role of the news organization in “analyzing” the “documents” while evading the question of how they came into their possession.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/26/defense-of-ali-watkins-exposes

In an attempt to defend its hiring of Ali Watkins, the young reporter caught having an affair with a now-indicted Senate staffer responsible for protecting some of the country’s most delicate secrets, the New York Times needs the reader to believe several incredible things:

President Trump, the Justice Department, and “right-wing” commentators are the true villains for targeting Watkins;
The affair between James Wolfe, the head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee and a married man 32 years her senior, and Watkins is just an example of how “complicated” relationships can be in Washington, D.C.;
Watkins’s ties to a powerful man with inside information about people related to the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with her being hired by top news organizations, even though she casually shared that information during job interviews;
Despite repeatedly citing unnamed “intelligence officials” in many of her articles, Watkins did not use her lover as a source;
Watkins has been on a two-week “pre-planned” vacation since her ex-boyfriend was arrested on June 7 and charged with lying to the FBI about his relationship with her. (She has worked for the Times for six months.);
Watkins—not people like Carter Page, who she smeared in her reporting thanks to classified gossip from her Scoop Daddy—is the real victim because the feds seized her email and phone records.

Got all that?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/the_sad_state_of_journalism_in_the_era_of_trump_derangement_syndrome.html

Worst of all: this is from Politico, not the Onion, as Mike@Doranimated tweeted. One or more editors of a publication that aspires to be the insider’s guide to Washington, DC, read an approved for publication a story knocking Trump advisor Stephen Miller for his behavior in third grade.

Let that sink in a minute, and never forget it when you look at anything published by Politico.

http://politicalmavens.com/

On Thursday, June 21, the Times offered a front page article entitled “Incivility Infests Life in the U.S. on Trump’s Cue” , along with a heads-up about “The Art of Hooking Up” that appears on the front page of its Arts section. That review is of an installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale devoted to the “places and practices of casual sex,” specifically gay hookups with “colorful condoms and other sexual accoutrements” scattered on the floor of the pavilion. Although there are 71 participants in this biennale, in keeping with the Times’ devotion to promoting all things gay, this is the one it chose to highlight. More items deemed newsworthy on that day included violence in Nicaragua, the Taliban killing of 30 in Afghanistan and the omission of “horrific details” from the UN report on Syrian chemical attacks.

Missing from the news altogether was the fact that on June 20th, Hamas fired 45 rockets into Israel, aimed at heavily populated areas near the border, one landing near a kindergarten. This omission is particularly notable since the Times handled Hamas’ storming Israel’s border fence with burning tires and explosive kites with daily front page coverage featuring gruesome pictures of Gazan fatalities and wounded “civilians.” It called this military attack a “protest” and labeled Israel’s retaliatory measures as disproportionate, barely mentioning that the majority of Gaza’s “civilian” activity was performed by Hamas terrorists continuing their calculated use of women and children in lethal activity to arouse international sympathy. As the Arabs have repeatedly stressed, their love of martyrdom and death give them a decided edge over Israeli values of choosing and preserving life.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/19/the-press-will-stop-at-nothing

When reporters work too hard to earn a Pulitzer Prize for orchestrating the political assassination of one of the president’s most effective cabinet members, sometimes, in their zeal, they can make a big mistake.

That is exactly what happened over the weekend when the New York Times was forced to post a lengthy correction to its latest hit piece on Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s EPA administrator. While the correction itself reveals a major blunder, it obfuscates the real outrage about the original story: The reporters went after Pruitt’s daughter.

The June 15 front-page article documented a laundry list of imaginary crimes at the EPA, such as staffers trying to score coveted sports tickets for the boss and arranging his meetings with former donors or industry pals—otherwise known as standard operating procedure in D.C. and every political power center in the nation. The Times reporters raged that Pruitt “had no hesitation in leveraging his stature as a cabinet member to solicit favors himself.” Last July, Pruitt allegedly asked an aide to negotiate “access” for him to attend the Washington Nationals’ batting practice. Oh, the horror! The piece was another installment in the paper’s relentless campaign against Pruitt, a top-tier target of the anti-Trump mob.

But in their eagerness to inflict another bruise on the much-abused EPA administrator, they hit his daughter, McKenna, a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

The Times accused Pruitt of using his post at the top of the EPA to obtain a letter of recommendation from a former Virginia lawmaker to help his daughter get into the prestigious UVA law school. To support its claim, the paper reported that the lawmaker even appeared on Pruitt’s official EPA calendar.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/14/our-imploding

Patrick Maines recently retired as president of the Media Institute, a nonprofit think tank promoting a strong First Amendment, sound communications policies, and journalistic excellence

If democracy in the United States is imperiled, as some say it is, then the pregnant question remains: Imperiled by whom? For the Left, Democrats, the pop culture industry, most of the mainstream press, and those in the permanent government bureaucracy known colloquially as “the deep state,” the answer is always Donald Trump. Trump because he is a president unschooled in the manners and mores of the country’s so-called elites.

For most everybody else, the answer may be found in the reflection of those same people and institutions whose over-the-top antics are a consequence of their hatred of Trump. They marinate in a vat of hypocrisy and self-promotion, and soothe themselves with the belief that the ends (removing Trump) justify their means.

Consider, for instance, the quality of political news coverage from outlets like CNN, NBC, and its offspring, MSNBC. No matter when you tune in, you can count on tendentious and nonstop anti-Trump commentary offered in a manner that perfectly blends hubris with hysteria.

But where is the historical perspective? Where is the gravity one would expect from people who work in the only industry protected by name in the constitution? If, in fact, the media are essential to our democracy, is it too much to expect from them the modest acknowledgment that nothing is more central to a democracy than elections, even those that are won by people one dislikes?

A Shameful Surrender

https://www.wsj.com/articles/don-and-the-dictator-1528831761

President Donald Trump seems to have given North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un a media coup and not received much in return—at least not yet. The joint statement signed by the U.S. President and North Korea’s leading thug says that the two countries will seek a lasting peace and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Mr. Trump says he received further disarmament promises beyond the written ones and the world will eventually find out if Mr. Kim fulfills them. In short, the Trump-Kim deal is precisely the kind of vague and well-meaning gesture in foreign affairs that the political left in the U.S. should love.

Tradition holds that such agreements are met with at least respectful coverage in the American media. For example, early in President Bill Clinton’s term the U.S. reached a similar agreement with North Korea’s communist dictatorship.

Twenty-five years ago today, the New York Times published an editorial called, “To Assure a Nuclear-Free Korea.” Given that Mr. Trump was in Singapore this week trying to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, it’s fair to say that the hopes invested by Times folk in the Clinton deal were not exactly realized. But back in 1993, the newspaper’s editorial board expressed admiration for officials in both the American and North Korean governments :

Deft diplomacy by the Clinton Administration has coaxed North Korea back from the brink. The North had threatened to bolt from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and build nuclear arms. It will now allow routine international inspections of its nuclear sites.

Gaining access to its nuclear waste sites will require further negotiation; that could provide more evidence of how much plutonium North Korea might already have produced. But the resumption of routine inspections is a critical first step toward assuring that the Korean Peninsula is truly nuclear-free.

The agreement is a tribute to sensible officials in Pyongyang who chose the path to prosperity over the road to ruin. It’s also a tribute to cool heads in Washington who refused to overreact to North Korea’s bizarre bargaining behavior.

Along with the tip of the cap to the “sensible officials in Pyongyang,” the Times went on to describe U.S. military exercises with our friends in democratic South Korea as “needlessly provocative.” Of course time would reveal that Washington’s cool heads had wildly underreacted. CONTINUE AT SITE