RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ya can’t make it up.

Here’s the headline in the Washington Post from the Post’s Erik Wemple.

Staffers at The Hill press management about the work of John Solomon

The story reads, in part:

A group of newsroom staffers at The Hill have complained to management about stories written by John Solomon, the publication’s executive vice president of digital video. The complaints were launched in December when Solomon and reporter Alison Spann broke a story under this headline: “Exclusive: Prominent lawyer sought donor cash for two Trump accusers.”

The gist of Solomon and Spann’s story: Prominent California lawyer Lisa Bloom worked to secure payments for women who “made or considered making sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump during the final months of the 2016 presidential race.” The story cited “documents and interviews,” plus the on-the-record explanations by Bloom herself.

The story impressed the conservative media world. Fox News host Sean Hannity called it a “bombshell report,” while conservative websites aggregated away.”

And then there was this, also from the Post’s Wemple on Solomon. The headline:

Sources: The Hill’s John Solomon offered money to Bill Clinton for an interview series

In which the Post’s Wemple attacks Solomon for pitching David Frost-Nixon style interviews with the former President in which Clinton, like Nixon before him, would get paid for his historical reflections.

The death of a dynamic and independent free press begins when the mainstream media becomes a propaganda organ for a government. And it was during the Obama regime’s eight long years that this process reached its present nadir.

Perhaps the media was once considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long now, the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead a disseminator of leftwing Democrat Party propaganda.

The dread examples of disinformation and misinformation were seen during the last century of Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes, but it now increasingly pollutes our own mainstream media (MSM).

The alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN – are unapologetic shills for an increasingly leftwing Democrat party. Newspapers share the same guilt. The New York Times and the Washington Post leading the way in a baleful charge.

It was our 18th century President, Thomas Jefferson, who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become the present demise of a free and vital press. He said:

“If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter.”

This week’s press conference featuring the White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, ostensibly was about President Trump’s health. In reality, it was a physical and mental check-up on the White House press corps, whose jejunity, mental impairment, and ideological blindness bespoke a dangerous warning sign for both the White House and the nation. These people are sick, and getting sicker. And until they’re all in quarantine, we’re all in danger of catching what’s obviously now a deadly communicable disease.

According to Dr. Jackson, the president’s health is excellent, especially for a 71-year-old man who subsists on little sleep and an old-fashioned American diet. But that wasn’t what the media was there to hear. In fact, they weren’t there to hear much of anything at all, or indeed even to listen (since they had already mentally discounted anything the doctor was going to say). Rather they had come to speak, using Dr. Jackson as the foil for “questions” that stated and restated the same Leftist-narrative talking point: that Trump is physically and mentally unfit to lead the nation that elected him—much to their shock and anger—fifteen months ago.

You can watch the whole thing here. But do note a few things going in, including the relative youth of the media folk, especially the women—who seem to be, like the Eloi in The Time Machine, chosen for their freshness and beauty rather than the penetrating quality of their minds. The men, meanwhile, skew slightly older, although no less primped and blow-dried.

Their “questions”—which were not phrased to elicit information but to score political points—almost all contained an underlying premise: that the president is manifestly unsuited to his high office, and the burden of proof is on the doctor to prove otherwise. Even when he stated in unequivocal terms that there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with Trump, the press corps practically sneered in his face, like small children demanding to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the sun will, in fact, rise in the east tomorrow. “Some people just have great genes,” said Dr. Jackson. But in the mechanistic world-view of “progressivism,” there can be no mysteries; everything must have a cause and effect, tied directly to diet, exercise, sex, race, and climate change. Things cannot simply just be.

Twenty years ago, no one had heard of either Facebook or Google, neither of which existed yet. For that matter, no one knew much about social media or search engines in general.

Cell phones were still simply mobile, small, and expensive telephones. There was no concept of a phone as a handheld computer.

Today, five companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) — have a collective worth of more than $3 trillion. Yet such transnational companies remain mostly exempt from the sort of regulations and accountability faced by most other industries.

Major corporations understandably fear product-liability laws. Oil companies are hectored by class-action lawsuits and headline-grabbing attorneys badgering them to pay up for supposed climate change brought on by commuters filling up each week. Tobacco companies have paid out billions of dollars due to cigarettes’ contribution to lung cancer. Pharmaceutical corporations are often forced to pay millions in fines when their prescription drugs cause dangerous side effects.

Yet every year, nearly a half-million Americans are injured in traffic accidents due to distracted driving involving a cell phone. No one knows how many millions of people worldwide are addicted to the apps on their smartphones — a habit that can be harder to break than an opiate addiction and can leave addicted users in a similar zombie-like condition. Yet unlike Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco, Big Tech is rarely held responsible for the deleterious effects of its products on millions the world over.

In most states, public boards and commissions regulate companies that provide public utilities. The theory is that such corporations use public spaces — from power poles to underground pipelines — to serve a captive public domain and provide an essential need. Radio and television stations are likewise regulated by the federal government on the similar assumption that the airwaves are not private property.

At 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, President Donald Trump tweeted the winners of his “FAKE NEWS Awards.” His tweet directed followers to a page on the Republican Party website (GOP.com), and the page crashed shortly after.

Here is the list:
1. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman

“The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed on the day of President Trump’s historic, landslide victory that the economy would never recover,” the article, written by the GOP team, reported. Trump’s victory was not a “landslide.” He won 304 votes in the Electoral College to Clinton’s 227 votes, and he took key states by razor-thin margins. Clinton won the popular vote 48.2 percent to Trump’s 46.1 percent, but Trump still won fair and square, by the rules of the game.

As for the economy, it did not take a hit from Trump’s win, so Krugman’s prediction was “fake news.”
2. ABC News’ Brian Ross

“ABC News’ Brian Ross CHOKES and sends markets in a downward spiral with false report,” the GOP team reported. Ross gave his report on December 1, saying that retired General Michael Flynn would testify that Donald Trump had ordered him to make contact with the Russians about foreign policy while he was still a candidate.

Indeed, the Dow Industrial Average dipped shortly after Ross’s report, until it was proven false.
3. CNN

What? CNN in third place? Now, that’s “fake news.” The network won the bronze trophy for “FALSELY” reporting “that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J. Trump, Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks.”

Indeed, CNN reported that Donald Trump Jr. received an email with links to the WikiLeaks archive from the hack on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on September 4, 2016 — before WikiLeaks published the emails. In reality, the email was sent on September 14, after the story went public. A well-deserved “fake news” award.

In her op-ed column in Wednesday’s Times, Bari Weiss, staff editor and writer for that section, reacts angrily to a recent addition to the #metoo complaint catalog, an account of someone’s hookup with Aziz Ansari. The young woman who posted her grievance objected to the comedian’s ignoring her non-verbal cues and her discomfort with his advances. There was no molestation, no assault, just a young woman with some unsatisfactory sex. Bari Weiss objects to the fact that the woman didn’t act on her own feelings, that she relinquished her own agency and then was blaming someone else. Surprisingly, Ms. Weiss doesn’t mention an article that preceded this one in the Sunday Times entitled, “For a Hookup, Just Use Your Words” by Gabrielle Ulubay, a writer who recently graduated from college. Here, the author is not offended at being used just for sex since she herself had invited the man over only for that purpose – her discontent is that he confused her with his disarming compliments such as calling her “smart, funny, creative and the girl of his dreams.” He told her that he’d see her later but never called again. This naive young woman is is asking not for better sex or more intimacy but less flattery and ghosting (disappearing without explanation). How someone can be comfortable with the zipless sex first described by Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) but hypersensitive to the eternal lack of truth in seduction is a by-product of the message with which young women have been indoctrinated since the 70’s.

Neither Bari Weiss nor Gabrielle Ulubay is concerned with the essential problem of today’s hookup culture. Originating in the 70’s on campuses which had begun to offer co-ed dorms and bathrooms and heralded by the Women’s Movement which viewed casual sex as another entitlement affording girls the same freedoms that boys had, hooking up has been a disaster for both sexes. Obama’s imposition of Title IX university sex patrols tied to eligibility for government aid only added to the fiasco, creating a default system in which women were absolved of responsibility for engaging in unwanted sex. Only males were held responsible in situations where both individuals were drunk, and males were presumed guilty in situations where sex between the two had occurred before but where the woman claimed not to have given consent on this occasion. The message was loud and clear: women are not required to take care of themselves – they have the school watching over them in loco parentis and they could get blotto to their heart’s content and still blame someone else for unwelcome consequences.

What if something like CNN and modern communications were around in early 1945? What if the rules of presidential news coverage were then as they are now? And what if such a mythical CNN hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt as much as it despises Donald Trump, then as right-wing as it is now hard left? How would the daily news in a mythical 1945 treat a now-iconic FDR? What would the country have thought of its president?

In the manner that we’ve learned that Donald Trump supposedly eats double servings of fast food and gulps down a dozen diet sodas a day, we instead might hear similar CNN “exclusives” about presidential diet and health, either from “unknown” sources in the White House or “fake news” exaggerations of rumor and innuendo.

Wolf Blitzer might give us a news bulletin something like this: “CNN in an exclusive report has learned that President Roosevelt is a sick, maybe dying, man. But the true nature of his health has long been covered up, most notably in last year’s election and is even now more dishonesty hidden. CNN has learned that the conspiracy of silence among the president’s family, his staff, and his doctors is long-standing, scandalous—and, in this reporter’s view, dangerous.”

“Sources tell me that the president’s blood pressure routinely hits 240 over 140. He has lost 40 pounds. Some sources tell CNN that the president suffers from chronic sinus and urinary infections. He may be battling skin cancer. CNN is now learning that the president could never walk or even stand up on his own.”

“That image of a robust president was also inaccurate—the fiction of collusion that for years has hidden the true extent of the president’s paralysis from the American people. CNN has also learned that President Roosevelt has been absent from the White House for weeks at a time and has been too ill to work at his desk. Yet he continues to chain smoke and drink a series of stiff drinks each evening, a habit dating back to Prohibition before he was president.”

In the midst of the “fake news” hysteria last year, Google launched a project to help curate reliable information for its readers by identifying articles and sites that need fact-checking. And this may come as a surprise to some of you, but it looks like the tech giant’s truth project is imbued with a tiny bit of ideological and political bias.

Eric Lieberman at The Daily Caller recently found that the fact checks displayed in Google’s search engine results are targeted almost exclusively at conservative publications. You can test it out yourself.

Now, you may believe that conservatives are hopeless liars in need of relentless correcting, so I’ll concede the point for argument’s sake. Even then, you’d have to admit it’s a small miracle that, according to Google’s search engine, not a single prominent liberal or mainstream site in the entire universe has ever uttered a dubious or questionable claim.

Luckily for us, there are methods available to analyze the veracity of Google’s project. One way, for example, is to take a “reviewed claim” made against The Federalist, the site I happen to know best, and contrast it to the coverage of other sites.

Consider the case of a woman named Eileen Wellstone. Out of many thousands of pieces published by The Federalist over the past four years, a single one mentions the name Eileen Wellstone. That article, detailing the sordid history of Bill Clinton, mentions her name exactly once: “Another woman, Eileen Wellstone, claimed Clinton raped her while he was at Oxford University in the late 1960s.”

For some reason, in this “reviewed claim” against The Federalist, Google sends the reader to a Snopes fact-check that argues that Clinton wasn’t expelled from Oxford over this alleged rape — a point I concede sounds completely accurate and is also an assertion that no one has ever made in this publication.

So the question is, does Google tag every article that relays accusations of sexual misconduct or rape as “unproven,” or just the ones against Bill Clinton? Or is the mention of Wellstone specifically worthy of a claim? The Wellstone case has not only been cited in all types of publications (and not in efforts to debunk it, either; 1,2,3,4,5, and so on) but by The Washington Post’s own fact-checker.

In a 2016 article detailing allegations against Bill Clinton that might be brought up by then-candidate Donald Trump, WaPo notes, “Eileen Wellstone says she was assaulted by Clinton when he was a student at Oxford University in 1969.” There is virtually no difference between that statement and the one published in The Federalist. Not that Google search engines users would know this when they search for the influential newspaper.