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MEDIA

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FAKE NEWS: Egyptians Enraged After BBC Report Quickly Falls Apart By Patrick Poole

By on March 1st, 2018

I’ve just returned this past weekend from Cairo, where Egyptians today are seething at Western media after a BBC report aired on Saturday regarding Egypt’s upcoming presidential elections.

The BBC report criticized Egypt’s human rights record, claiming that political opponents had been “disappeared” by Egyptian authorities. However, the main subject of the report, who had allegedly been “disappeared,” quickly showed up alive, well, living with her husband in Giza, and directly refuting the allegations made by the BBC.

Orla Guerin’s report, entitled “The Shadow Over Egypt,” had struck an ominous tone: “Egypt will elect a president next month. Opponents have been rounded up. Many have been jailed, tortured or disappeared.”

Admittedly, there is much for Western media and countries to criticize regarding Egypt’s human rights record. But many Egyptians see this episode as yet another instance of Western media hyping claims by the Muslim Brotherhood or Western NGOs of “disappearances” of activists. This was not the first time; other subjects were later arrested as parts of terror cells or for appearing in terrorist videos.

The BBC report led with the story of 23-year-old Zubeida. According to her family, she and her mother had been detained and tortured by the Egyptian government after participating in Muslim Brotherhood protests. Following their release, they were said to have disappeared altogether last April: Zubaida’s mother claimed that armed and masked men showed up at the house and abducted her after throwing her into a police vehicle.

Soon, ONTV aired Zubeida herself being interviewed alongside her husband and newborn son, and directly refuting the allegations. During Zubeida’s interview with Amr Adib of ONTV, she acknowledged that she and her mother had been detained. But she denied the allegations of torture and threats of rape. And rather than being abducted by police, Zubaida had been living in Giza with her husband (she presented their March 2017 marriage certificate) and had simply not been in communication with her mother for months over disagreements about her marriage: CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

Good Climate News Isn’t Told Reporting scientific progress would require admitting uncertainties. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on February 28th, 2018

The biggest lie in American climate journalism is that reporters cover climate science as a science.

Except for a report on the Washington Post website that was picked up by a couple of regional papers, an important study on the most important question in climate science last month went completely unnoticed in the U.S. media. Consult the laughably named website Inside Climate News, which poses as authoritative. A query yields only the response “Your search did not return any results” plus a come-on for donations to “Keep Environmental Journalism Alive.”

So we’ll quote a passage in an exemplary French report that begins, “But uncertainty about how hot things will get also stems from the inability of scientists to nail down a very simple question: By how much will Earth’s average surface temperature go up if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled?”

“That ‘known unknown’ is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and for the last 25 years the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the ultimate authority on climate science—has settled on a range of 1.5 C to 4.5 C.”

The French report describes a new study by climate physicists Peter Cox and Mark Williamson of the University of Exeter and Chris Huntingford of the U.K.’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology. Not only does it narrow the range of expected warming to between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius, but they rule out the possibility of worrying outcomes higher than 4 degrees.

Their study might be less interesting and newsworthy if it weren’t the latest crystallization of a trend. Even the IPCC is an example. Slightly contrary to the French report, it backpedaled in 2013 to adopt a wider range of uncertainty, and did so entirely in the direction of less warming.

More to the point, this was a much-needed confession of scientific failure that the Exeter group and others are trying to remedy. The IPCC’s current estimate is no more useful or precise than one developed in 1979 by the U.S. National Research Council, when computers and data sets were far more primitive.

This 40-year lack of progress is no less embarrassing for being thoroughly unreported in the mainstream press. The journal Nature, where the new study appears, frankly refers to an “intractable problem.” In an accompanying commentary, a climate scientist says the issue remains “stubbornly uncertain.”

You may be falling out of your chair right now if you recall last year’s lawsuit by New York’s attorney general against Exxon, itself a pioneering pursuer of climate studies, for daring to mention the existence of continuing “uncertainties.”

This question of climate sensitivity goes not just to how much warming we can expect. It goes to the (almost verboten) question of whether the expected warming will be a net plus or net minus for humanity. And whether the benefit of curbing fossil fuels would be worth the cost.

Yet you can practically chart the deepening idiocy of U.S. climate reporting since the 1980s by how these knotty, interesting questions have fallen away in favor of an alleged fight between science and deniers.

“Fake news” is not our favorite pejorative. A better analysis is offered by former New York Times reporter Michael Cieply in a piece he wrote in 2016 when he started a new job at Deadline.com. He describes how, unlike at a traditional “reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper,” reporters at the Times were required to “match stories with what internally was often called ‘the narrative.’ ”

Leaving climate sensitivity uncertainties out of the narrative certainly distorts the reporting that follows. Take a widely cited IPCC estimate that “with 95% certainty,” humans are responsible for at least half the warming observed between 1951 and 2010. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Academia, Internet Giants vs. Free Speech Frank V. Vernuccio, Jr., J.D see note please

By on February 28th, 2018

Social media giants are routinely “disappearing” content and squelching free speech.
(Be sure to access the Project Veritas videos specifically related to Twitter’s admission of encoding parameters to provide automatic shadowbanning). – Janet Levy

The growing threats to free speech throughout the United States come from a number of sources, including government officials, academia, and the rising influence and power of social media giants.
The threats by government leaders, such as former attorney general Loretta Lynch who, while in office, considered “criminally prosecuting” anyone who disagreed with President Obama on climate change, and the move by Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) to limit the application of the First Amendment concerning paid political speech, may have diminished due to the results of the 2016 election. But in other circles, the pressure to mothball free speech rights continues.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has released a vital document, which charts academic freedom over the past 103 years. According to author David Randall, “We publish this chart today because America faces a growing crisis about who can say what on our college campuses.”
According to the study, “At root this is a crisis of authority. In recent decades university administrators, professors, and student activists have quietly excluded more and more voices from the exchange of views on campus. This has taken shape in several ways, not all of which are reducible to violations of ‘academic freedom.’ The narrowing of campus debate by de-selection of conservatives from faculty positions, for example, is not directly a question of academic freedom though it has proven to have dire consequences in various fields where professors have severely limited the range of ideas they present in courses …Potent threats to academic freedom can arise from the collective will of faculty members themselves. This is the situation that confronts us today. Decades of progressive orthodoxy in hiring, textbooks, syllabi, student affairs, and public events have created campus cultures where legitimate intellectual debates are stifled and where dissenters, when they do venture forth, are often met with censorious and sometimes violent responses. Student mobs, egged on by professors and administrators, now sometimes riot to prevent such dissent. The idea of “safe spaces” and a new view of academic freedom as a threat to the psychological wellbeing of disadvantaged minorities have gained astonishing popularity among students.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Journalists Hate Conspiracy Theories and Fake News, Except When They Don’t By Jim Treacher

By on February 22nd, 2018

Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the media can’t seem to figure out why nobody trusts them anymore. Their profession tends to poll about as well as the dregs of society, like pimps and drug dealers and politicians. And yet the less respect journalists earn, the more they demand. The less professional they are, the more they scold us for talking back to them. The more we expose their lies, the louder they lie.

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about conspiracy theories, so I thought I’d examine a few of them.

Let’s start off with a look at the once-respected magazine with the increasingly ironic title Newsweek. Earlier this week, Nina “Presidential Kneepads” Burleigh published a story with a sensational headline: “How an Alt-Right Bot Network Took Down Al Franken.” Wow, sounds juicy!

According to Burleigh, Franken’s downfall wasn’t due to his own actions. It had nothing to do with the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by numerous women. It wasn’t because his own colleagues in the Senate demanded his resignation. No, it was all a nefarious plot by evil Russians and white nationalists and other popular villains of the day. The bad guys used nefarious Internet magic to take Franken down, apparently because they wanted a slightly less famous left-leaning Minnesota liberal to take his Senate seat.

There was just one problem: It wasn’t true. At all. Whoops!

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How The Media Enable Rep. Adam Schiff’s Russian Bot Conspiracy Theories For more than a year, Adam Schiff has been hopping to all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between President Trump and Russia.By Mollie Hemingway

By on February 22nd, 2018

Last week, Lawrence Tribe suggested, without evidence, that a plane crash in Russia was related to fallout from the Russian dossier operation orchestrated and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Tribe is a Harvard Law professor, a passionate critic of President Donald Trump, and a known Russia conspiracy theorist. So it should have been surprising that the same day he was tweeting out plane crash conspiracy theories, he also argued in a “facially absurd” op-ed in The New York Times that Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., should be charged with obstruction of justice — no, really — for performing congressional oversight of the FBI.

Then again, it was only last May that The New York Times published another Russia conspiracy theorist named Louise Mensch talking about Russian hacking. Yes, the same Louise Mensch who believes that the “Marshal of the Supreme Court” told Trump about his impeachment and that Steve Bannon faces the death penalty for espionage. (Forget it, she’s rolling.)

When it comes to the Russia-Trump collusion theory, a bit more journalistic rigor is in order. One of the most enthusiastic promulgators of a Russia-Trump collusion theory is Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member on Nunes’ House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. For more than a year, Schiff has been hopping around all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between Trump and Russia.

Leaks from his committee that advance this theory frequently get published, even if they fail to hold up under scrutiny. But even his public actions shouldn’t be accepted so uncritically.
Experts Refute The Russia Charge

On January 23, public interest in the memo from the majority of the intelligence committee had been high, as evidenced by the demand to #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag on Twitter and Facebook. When the hashtag went viral, Schiff had a theory that it wasn’t the American public that was interested in abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Nope, it was Russians! Secret Russian bots were trying to make it look like Americans were interested in FISA abuse against a Trump campaign affiliate.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller Focuses on Molehills The mountain is whether the FBI was an unwitting agent of Russian influence. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on February 21st, 2018

On Aug. 17, 2015, 63 days after Donald Trump’s escalator ride at Trump Tower, a lightbulb went on. Certain pro-Trump emails that colleagues and I were receiving were coming from Vladimir Putin’s internet trolls. “The Kremlin is now in the Donald’s corner . . .?” I emailed a co-worker.

The most valuable thing said last week was said by Sen. Jim Risch during a hearing, when he pointed out that the American people “realize that there’s people attempting to manipulate them.”

The least valuable was the prediction by three intelligence chiefs that Russia’s meddling will continue through 2018 and 2020. It may or may not, but what else were they going to say? There’s no upside to “estimating” anything else. This is a big part of what’s wrong with our intelligence establishment, handling inherently ambiguous matters and overwhelmingly incentivized, at least at the top, to say whatever is most politically and institutionally expedient.

Let’s be realistic: The Russian propaganda activities detailed in Robert Mueller’s indictment last week had less impact on the election than 20 seconds of cable TV coverage (pick a channel) of any of Mr. Trump’s rallies.

Only the media’s beloved hindsight fallacy suggests otherwise. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s campaign made good use of Russia to discredit Mr. Trump in the eyes of voters. What was the net effect on the vote? The press doesn’t know. Worse, it doesn’t know that it doesn’t know.

Ditto the media’s new favorite song that the U.S. has done nothing to punish Mr. Putin’s provocations. The U.S. government does not tell the public everything it does. American warplanes recently killed dozens, perhaps as many as 200, Russian mercenaries in Syria employed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a key figure in the Mueller indictment. For the first time in the Syrian theater, a man-portable antiaircraft weapon appeared in the hands of the Syrian opposition, shooting down a Russian jet. The U.S. government has denied a role, but the message, if that’s what it was, would be historically resonant. The U.S. used such missiles to raise the cost of Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan and Angola in the 1980s. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Facebook “Intellectually Terrorizes” a Human Rights Activist Or, an urgent complaint to Facebook management. February 20, 2018 Magdi Khalil

By on February 20th, 2018

Editor’s note: Magdi Khalil, an Egyptian-born human right’s activist and Copt now living in America, explains how he escaped Egyptian-style terror only to suffer from a sort of Facebook Terrorism. In the Arab world, Khalil is a well-known political analyst and prolific writer who frequently appears on Al Jazeera, where he debates dictatorial and radical Islamist opponents.

My name is Magdi Khalil, I am an American citizen and a resident of Virginia. My Facebook page can be found here.

I currently work as an analyst researcher at an American institution. For over 20 years, I have been a well-known commentator on Middle Eastern affairs and the executive editor of international pages for a Cairo-based newspaper. I also made more than a thousand TV appearances as a political commentator on various programs broadcast on Middle Eastern TV channels. I have published more than 2,000 articles and research, and authored a number of books. While most of my published work is in Arabic, I have also published many articles in English.

I am also a human rights advocate, and have been involved in founding several human rights centers, including Coptic Solidarity in Washington, and the Middle East Freedom Forum. I currently serve as a member of the advisory board of MEMRI, the board of directors of Coptic Solidarity, as well as being the director of the Middle East Freedom Forum.

Given my strong advocacy for human rights and the rights of religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East, and my outspoken stance and writings against Islamic terrorism, I naturally attracted the ire and hostility of Egyptian and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies, as well as extremist Islamic groups. My activities, including my Facebook page, became a favorite target for those agencies and groups, which have at their disposal electronic “militias” working to flood Facebook Administration and other social media with a deluge of false complaints against their perceived opponents.

Unfortunately, I have had to deal with this issue repeatedly. Furthermore, I suspect that there may be some staff members in Facebook Administration, particularly in Middle East-based offices, who support these entities and target their opponents.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Bruce Thornton :Progs Love a Man in a Uniform Why the media fell in love with North Korea’s Kim Yo-jong.

By on February 19th, 2018

The “uniform” the eighties band Gang of Four was singing about is not the one our Armed Forces wear. Our military uniforms are the emblem of a superb professional fighting force that is accountable to Constitutional limits, and commanded by a civilian president elected by the sovereign people. No, progressives love the uniform worn by the “strong man,” the “man on horseback,” the “great leader,” what in Latin America is called a “caudillo,” or “cacique,” or more crudely, “El Gran Chingon,” the thugs with the gaudy Gilbert-and-Sullivan uniforms bedecked with rows of phony medals.

Hence the left’s admiration for Castro, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Chavez, and most recently Kim Jong Un’s sister, the head of propaganda for the North Korean terror state whom the left’s media lackeys effusively praised during her appearance at the Olympics. No matter how blood-stained, any tyrant can be an object of the left’s affection, as long as he or she is on the side of “revolution” against the hated capitalists and the repressed bourgeoisie. This century-long love affair explains the endless parade of useful idiots making pilgrimages to totalitarian hell-holes like Stalin’s Russia or Chavez’s Venezuela or Castro’s Cuba, there to swoon over the Potemkin heaven on earth.

It also accounts in part for the surreal, cult-like worship of the tin-pot messiah Barack Obama, whose very trouser crease could thrill the starry-eyed pundit, whose banal rhetoric could send tingles down the leg of the most hard-bitten journalist. That’s why Obama’s use of Executive Orders and his “phone and pen” to subvert the Constitution’s separation of powers was celebrated by the same progressives who squeal about any Republican president’s “imperial overreach.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Mental Health and Gun Control By Daniel John Sobieski

By on February 19th, 2018

Never mind that the FBI failed to heed and follow up repeated and explicit warning about Nikolas Cruz before his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida. Never mind the FBI was too busy chasing phantom Russian collusion to locate a future killer that any nerd living in his parent’s basement could have located with ease. According to mental health professional Jimmy Kimmel, Trump made Parkland happen by rescinding Obama administration regulations barring the mentally ill from getting guns:

Kimmel kept addressing Trump by adding that politicians and the president like to say that mass shootings are a mental health issue. He then said that one of the first acts of Trump’s presidency was to roll back a regulation designed to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill.

“Your party voted to repeal the mandates on coverage for mental health,” Kimmel said. “So I agree, this is a mental illness issue because if you don’t think we need to do something about it, you are obviously mentally ill.”

What in fact happened is that President Trump and the Republican Congress removed regulations not designed to protect the public but intended to disarm innocent and law-abiding senior citizens based on the assumption that if they need help handling their finances they must be dangerous and must be disarmed. When was the last time grandpa shot up his nursing home?

The reality is somewhat different from Kimmel’s slanderous falsehood. As Snopes reports:

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media’s Walk-of-Shame Won’t End By Julie Kelly

By on February 19th, 2018

The media have been on a walk-of-shame bender since 2016. They were whored out by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, swallowed the Christopher Steele dossier, and still get drunk-dialed by the Left. The cheap-date journos show up every time.Each morning, the media floozies trudge through the quad wearing their “I’m With Her” t-shirts from the night before while they come up with a new cover story for their bad behavior. They lie, distort what actually happened, change the subject, and make excuses for why they got in bed with an ungrateful lover. “Hey, it’s better than sleeping with that other guy!” They insist they’re not being used, but everyone who sees them meander back to the dorm knows they are.

Last week was perhaps one of the tawdriest of the walks of shame taken by the flat-on-its-back, call-me-later commentariat. Still desperate to prove their Hillary hook-up was worth it, the media had several flings over the past several days: North Korea, FBI Director Christopher Wray (again), a white supremacist group, and Russian social-media bots all got bedded. Like the easy girl who never learns her lesson, journalists and opinion-writers keep ruining their reputations in the futile hope of getting some love from their greedy suitors in the #Resistance, then they traipse their escapades through news websites and social media to justify their deed.

Let’s take a look at last week’s Walk of Shame, shall we?

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