RUTHFULLY YOURS

Political elites on both sides of the Atlantic are still frothing over President Donald Trump’s retweeting of three videos recording Muslims acting badly. The videos originated with a reviled British organization, Britain First, deemed a hate group by the British establishment for linking Britain’s high levels of Muslim immigration to incidents of Islamic terrorism. One such video, from 2013, shows a Muslim cleric in a Syrian village deliberately shattering a terra cotta statue of the Virgin Mary. The second, also from 2013, shows a scene of civil anarchy in Alexandria, Egypt, in which Islamists push two teenagers off a turret onto a lower roof level and beat at least one to death. The third, from May 2017, allegedly shows a Muslim teenager in the Netherlands push over a white boy on crutches and repeatedly kick him while he is on the ground.

By retweeting, Trump was “normalizing hatred,” according to elite opinion. He ignored the “context” of events, claimed the New York Times—such as the fact that the icon-smasher was not just a “Muslim,” as identified in the original tweet, but an extremist cleric whose group had previously destroyed another Mary statue in his village. Why that “context” should defuse concern about the spread of radical Islamic ideology is mysterious. Likewise, while it’s true that the fatal stomping in Egypt occurred during a time of civil and political unrest, that “context” does not change the reality of remorseless violence.

As for the third video, the media and Dutch officials pounced on the fact that the tweets identified the teen assailant as a Muslim migrant, when he was in fact born in the Netherlands. Thus, his Muslim identity is allegedly irrelevant. This is the familiar strategy whenever a second-generation Muslim commits an act of terrorism in the West (which this assault clearly was not): the fact that the terrorist was not a first-generation immigrant supposedly means that Islamist terrorism is not an immigration problem. To the contrary, terrorism by second-generation Muslim immigrants is more of an immigration problem than first-generation terrorism, since it shows a failure to assimilate Western values.

The fury that Trump’s tweets have inspired is hard to square with cable news’ predilection for running endless repeats of videos showing police-officer use of force against civilians. If the media ever provided “context” for those videos, it passed by too fast for the eye to catch. That context might include the suspect’s behavior leading up to the officer’s use of force or the 911 calls that triggered an officer’s investigation—such as the Cleveland police dispatcher’s report of a black male who “keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,” which led to the tragic shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, who was doing just that with an exact replica toy pistol. It could include the number of armed robberies and drive-by shootings in a neighborhood to explain how an officer might assess the risk of armed violence from a resisting suspect.

This context is almost never offered, however, en route to the false narrative that we’re living through an epidemic of police violence against black males. The media’s stoking of that narrative has had a far greater effect on the nation’s crime rate and on race relations than Trump’s retweets have had on public perceptions of Islamic violence.

There’s only one American journalist who truly merits a Pulitzer Prize this year: Glenn Greenwald. He’s been on the biggest story of the year from day one. No, I don’t mean Russiagate, the main stage for the media’s preening self-advertisements of its heroic “resistance,” like “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In fact, the narrative holding that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is the chief piece of evidence that Greenwald has used to nail the year’s real top story—how the American press became a woozy facsimile of Pravda.

Last week, Greenwald called out the press for its latest blunder: “Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” wrote Greenwald. “The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.”

The question of why everyone got the same big scoop on the same day—only to find that the story was totally wrong—is a thread that leads to some very interesting places. So let’s follow it.

CNN claimed that an email sent to Donald Trump and his campaign officials that linked to WikiLeaks documents was dated Sept. 4, 2016—therefore showing that WikiLeaks, and by implication the Kremlin, had offered the Trump campaign an exclusive preview of damaging Democratic National Committee emails. But in fact, the email was dated Sept. 14—10 days later—and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier, meaning the big scoop proving Trump’s Russia ties was, in fact, a story about spam.

“Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy,” Greenwald continued, “which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like—would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.”

I’m not generally a big fan of Greenwald. His attacks on Israel are gross; His continued defense of Edward Snowden, who turned over information to an adversary that may endanger American lives, seems, at best, naïve and self-serving. That said, the last few years have certainly brought me around to his view that abuses of our national-security-surveillance apparatus and the power it gives to unelected bureaucrats are a real threat to how Americans live. But finally it doesn’t matter what I think about Greenwald’s opinions—he might believe that a race of super-intelligent gender-neutral cats rules the galaxy next to ours, or that John Travolta has an important message for all mankind—because good journalism isn’t about the personal or political beliefs of individual reporters. All that actually matters is whether you use the tools of the trade to get the story right.

But that sort of thing isn’t what matters to journalists anymore, or else they wouldn’t have spent the past year running pieces about Trump and Russia that are almost immediately falsified, then updated with clarifications, or corrected, or retracted, and then are vanished down the memory hole—with no institutional accountability or apparent concern for truth. This startling unconcern goes back at least as far as that big Washington Post “exclusive” in January about Russia hacking an electrical dam in Vermont—a story that was entirely false. Since then, it’s all been downhill.

How many times has the media since promised the smoking gun that will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to swing the Presidency away from Hillary Clinton? Boom! And then nothing. Poof.

It’s a wonder that President Donald Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself.

The media’s errors over the past week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the past year, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. They all slanted one way — namely, toward lurid conclusions about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians.

Every media outlet makes mistakes. It’s easier than ever to run with fragmentary or dubious information in a frenzied news cycle that never stops. But underlying the media blunders was an assumption — not based on any evidence we’ve yet seen — of Trump guilt in the Russia matter. This was news, in other words, too anti-Trump to check.

On the day it broke that Michael Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI, Brian Ross of ABC News had a seemingly epic scoop. He reported that Flynn would testify that Donald Trump directed him to make contacts with Russian officials prior to the election. This was the collusion equivalent of a four-alarm fire. A New York Times columnist tweeted, “President Mike Pence, here we come.” The stock market dropped several hundred points.

Then Ross “clarified” the story to say that Trump instructed Flynn to reach out to the Russians after the election. This wasn’t a minor detail of chronology; it ripped the heart out of the story. Ross’s blockbuster went from a suggestion of collusion to a suggestion of the normal course of business during a presidential transition. ABC suspended Ross for a month.

CNN followed this up with its own botched report on how Don Trump Jr. allegedly got a heads-up email prior to the release of a batch of WikiLeaks emails during the campaign. The item rocketed around the Internet — accompanied by explosive imagery — and was repeated by other major news organizations. The only problem is CNN flubbed the date. The email came after the release of the documents, not before. Once again, supposed evidence of collusion evaporated upon contact with better-informed, follow-up reporting. CNN corrected its dispatch, and one of its correspondents called the episode “a black eye.”

Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Trump records from Deutsche Bank, before clarifying to say that Mueller had subpoenaed people related to Trump, perhaps Paul Manafort. A Mueller move that would have crossed a Trump “red line” against investigation of his finances — risking a constitutional showdown — had become something more ambiguous.

If the press had less faith that Robert Mueller is on the verge of bringing the Trump presidency to its knees, it might exercise a little more discrimination. When your only frame of reference for the Mueller investigation is Watergate, everything looks like a proverbial smoking gun. When for professional reasons (the story of the century) and perhaps partisan ones (a hated Republican kicked out of the office) you’re rooting for the worst, you let your guard down.

The most effective way for the media to have refuted Donald Trump’s 24/7 accusations of “fake news” would have been to publish disinterested, factually based accounts of his presidency. The Trump record should have been set straight through logic and evidence.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/11/fake-truth/

So one would think after a year of disseminating fake news aimed at Donald Trump (Melania Trump was leaving the White House; Donald Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the West Wing; Trump planned to send troops into Mexico, etc.) that Washington and New York journalists would be especially scrupulous in their reporting to avoid substantiating one of Trump’s favorite refrains.

Instead, either blinded by real hatred or hyper-partisanship or both, much of the media has redoubled their reporting of rumor and fictions as facts—at least if they empower preconceived and useful bias against Trump. But after the year-long tit-for-tat with the president, the media has earned less public support in polls than has the president. It is the age-old nature of politicians of every stripe to exaggerate and mislead, but the duty of journalists to keep them honest—not to trump their yarns.

A Dangerous Tic
Last week, ABC News erroneously reported that Michael Flynn, in a supposed new role of cooperation with the prosecution, was prepared to testify that Trump, while still a candidate, ordered him improperly to contact (and, by inference, to collude with) Russian government officials.

For a while, the startling news sent the stock market into a fall of over 300 points. Was the purported pro-business Trump agenda shortly to be derailed by “proof” of a possible impeachable offense? A little while later, however, ABC was forced to retract that story, to suspend Brian Ross (the reporter involved), and to offer a correction that Trump actually had been president-elect at the time of the contact and completely within his elected purview to reach out to foreign governments.

Reuters, likewise eager to fuel the narrative of a colluding Trump, asserted that the Mueller investigators had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records of Trump and his family. Again, the leaked inference was that the inquiry suddenly was coming near to hard evidence of Trump wrongdoing and was thus entering its penultimate stage. In truth, Mueller has more routinely subpoenaed the records of Trump associates, not Trump himself or his family.

In the most egregious example of peddling fake news, CNN reported that candidate Trump had once received an email entrée to unreleased Wikileaks documents—again suggesting some sort of collusion with Russian or pro-Russian interests. But that narrative was soon discredited, too. CNN failed to note that the email was sent 10 days later than it had originally reported, and instead referred to information already released into the public domain by Wikileaks.

In this same brief period, Washington Post reporter David Weigel, perhaps eager to suggest that Trump’s popularity among his base was at last waning, tweeted a sardonic captioned photo of half-empty seats at a Trump rally in Pensacola, Florida. He soon offered a retraction and noted his tweeted image wrongly showed the venue well before the actual start of the event—a fact he surely must have known.

We’re certainly living in strange times when the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is among the most media-friendly lawmakers in Washington. The times would be less strange if the media were a little less friendly in return.

Since they are charged with overseeing America’s spy agencies, the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees are usually as tight-lipped a group of politicians as you’ll find. Each one takes an oath to protect the country’s secrets and is expected to take special care in protecting the classified information entrusted to them.

That’s the hope anyway. In practice Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) rarely misses an opportunity to publicly characterize the non-public information that he claims to have seen. This raises the question of whether he’s violating the rules of the committee by discussing classified intelligence, or perhaps misleading the public about what he’s seen. Before giving him yet another platform to hurl allegations of treasonous behavior, journalists should first demand that he show up with some facts.

For the better part of a year, Mr. Schiff has been teasing the public with claims of wrongdoing by his political adversaries, but refusing to back them up. Back in March, NBC News reported:

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee claimed Wednesday evening that he has seen “more than circumstantial evidence” that associates of President Donald Trump colluded with Russia while the Kremlin attempted to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the Ranking Member on the committee, was asked by Chuck Todd on “Meet The Press Daily” whether or not he only has a circumstantial case.

“Actually no, Chuck,” he said. “I can tell you that the case is more than that and I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”

That sure sounded ominous. But nearly nine months later, he’s still going on talk shows and making accusations. He’s still declining to back them up. And he’s still finding friendly news organizations to broadcast his claims, even though by this time a fact-free Schiff accusation of collusion with Russians can hardly be considered news. On Sunday Jake Tapper interviewed Mr. Schiff and the CNN host did make an effort to finally get Mr. Schiff to show his cards.

We live in a time of media bias. From universities to news anchors to reporters, opinions dominate facts. “Our information environment is sick,” so warns David Patrikarakos, in his book War in 140 Characters, “…where facts are less important than narrative, where people emote rather than debate…” What is less publicized is bias in the federal government’s bureaucracy. For example, in last year’s election, 97% of Justice Department employees’ political contributions went to Hillary Clinton. She received 94% of all donations from IRS employees, and from those in the Department of Education, she received 99.7% of all monies. That bias is understandable, in the sense that Democrats are the Party of an expanding government, while Republicans would shrink it. But, still…

Trying to uncover the facts of the tax bill, the Mueller investigation, or climate change is more challenging than a 1000-piece jig-saw puzzle, and more fraught with emotion than a teen-ager. Advocacy has replaced reporting, and angry words, reasoned debate. Political partisanship is molded into our youths in our colleges and universities. Objectivity is missing from those responsible for ensuring a smooth, post-election transition from one Party to another. We have more information at our finger tips than ever before, but fewer disinterested reporters and news sources. Consequently, we are more polarized. For someone trying to make sense of the news, these barriers are almost insurmountable. A decline in print media and the rise in internet-related news, has aggravated the bias.

The tax bill has been vilified. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called it “Armageddon,” though later walked that back. Larry Summers, economist, and former president of Harvard, said the bill would kill 10,000 people each year. There was no evidence to support such an imprudent allegation. “…Tilting the United States tax code to benefit wealthy Americans…,” is the way The New York Times put it. The article omitted the fact that the top 1% of wage earners pay 40% of all income taxes, that the top 10% pay 70%, and that the bottom 50% pay no federal income taxes. In the Wall Street Journal, Tom Steyer was hyperbolic. The plan “…puts another knife into American Democracy.” Consider the hullabaloo regarding losing or limiting the ability to deduct state and local taxes. Who gets hurt? It is not the 80% of the population that makes less than $100,000 a year. It is the wealthy, like Mr. Steyer in high-income-taxed states like California, and New York, New Jersey and Connecticut where publishers, editors and reporters of the Times live.

The Washington Post might want to roll out a new motto in 2018. Instead of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” perhaps the paper should try, “Conservatism Dies in Bitterness.”https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/08/washington-post-where-conservatism-dies-in-bitterness/

Since Donald Trump’s election, the Post has become an asylum—er, home—for conservative sore-losers who cannot get over the fact that Trump won the presidency over their erudite objections. One-time conservative heroes such as George Will and Kathleen Parker serve up red-meat rants against Trump to curry favor with the Post’s liberal readership. It’s a shrewd, if not cynical, tactic by columnists with waning influence to stay relevant in the age of Trump, and a calculated move by the paper to refute charges of bias by featuring allegedly conservative columnists.

But in its zeal to add another drummer to the paper’s anti-Trump conservative garage band, the Post has dug up some interesting characters. On Wednesday, the Post published a column by Jay Kaganoff, who urged his “fellow conservatives” to call on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign. Kaganoff wrote a solemn plea—complete with a scummy reference to Thomas’s alleged appetite for pornography—for “conservatives [to] seriously reconsider our continued support for Thomas in light of his past.”

Taking a cue from liberals who are now conveniently condemning Bill Clinton 20 years later, Kaganoff said this:

I believe Anita Hill. I believe that Clarence Thomas abused his authority to sexually harass a woman who worked for him. And lied about it. And smeared his accuser. As painful as it is to repudiate a man I respected, I believe Thomas should never have been confirmed and should resign.

So, who is this conservative crusader whose call to remove a sitting Supreme Court justice we real conservatives should heed? Kaganoff’s byline claims he has “written for National Review Online and Commentary Magazine, among others.” As a National Review Online contributor, I have never heard his name, nor read anything he has written. On Facebook, National Review publisher emeritus Jack Fowler wrote: “The guy who penned it claims an NR pedigree. Fact: He wrote for NR twice under a pseudonym. Maybe he thinks he’s Mark Twain.” Naturally, Commentary’s archive came up empty and a Google search of his name doesn’t produce much of anything. But despite his thin, questionable résumé, the Post gave Kaganoff 1,100-words worth of prime real estate on its op-ed pages to demand Thomas’s ouster. Why? To crib a famous line from “The Brady Bunch,” because he fit the suit.

Early on Friday, CNN promoted its latest breathless report purporting to show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. CNN has been extremely invested in the narrative of collusion for the last year.

In June, CNN was forced to pull one of its Russia-Trump conspiracy stories that “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.” The discredited story was based on a single anonymous source who connected Anthony Scaramucci, a prominent ally of President Trump, to a Russian investment fund managed by a Kremlin-controlled bank. Three journalists who worked on the story were fired.

But many of the other stories CNN pushed had serious problems, including one that claimed fired FBI head Jim Comey would testify he never told President Trump three times that he was not under FBI investigation. That’s precisely what he testified the next morning after the story ran. Still other stories are headlined explosively and presented on-air breathlessly while being quite anodyne. Earlier this week, was a piece headlined, “Exclusive: Previously undisclosed emails show follow-up after Trump Tower meeting.” The piece quietly revealed that Trump Jr. didn’t receive the follow-up and the “follow-up” was in no way incriminating or suggesting treasonous collusion to steal an election. Such stories have been par for the course for the Russia-Trump collusion narrative.

Friday morning’s report — which got the usual suspects extremely excited — was one such story. Broadcast widely on air and online, it intimated that Donald Trump, Jr. was given an advance notice about documents hacked or phished from Democrats before they were publicly available. The story didn’t include any evidence that the random dude who emailed Trump, Jr. was correct, that his email had been opened, that he was connected to Russia, or anything else to justify the excitement that those all-in on the collusion narrative had in response to it.

But more than that, it turned out that CNN completely botched the story. Instead of advance notice that this random dude sent in to Trump affiliates, it was late notice that this random dude sent in. The Washington Post obtained the email and reported that CNN had completely messed up the story, claiming a September 4 date to an email that was actually sent on September 14, a day after the documents were publicly available.

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow to the Trump/Russia collusion story: