RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review became embroiled in controversy last week when one author published an inaccurate review, Vanity Fair reports.

Michelle Goldberg reviewed Vanessa Grigoriadis’s new book, Blurred Lines, which examines the debate about consensual sex on college campuses. Goldberg offers a few pieces of praise, Vanity Fair writes, before giving a harsh critique of the book, even saying that “occasionally (Grigoriadis) makes baffling errors that threaten to undermine her entire book,” according to Vanity Fair.

But Grigoriadis defended herself and her book on her Facebook page, saying that Goldberg performed “some of her own (incompetent) journalism here.”

By the time the issue went public, a large correction had been added to Goldberg’s piece, writes Vanity Fair.

The journalism and media circles began buzzing. Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple published an account of what happened on his blog, and Vanity Fair reports that various women’s organizations chimed in as well. Goldberg took to Twitter to say that she would “give a kidney and five years of my life back” to take back the assertions, writes Vanity Fair, and expressed frustration with how the whole thing played out.

Vanity Fair says that the controversy set off “drama within the halls of the Times,” because it is a significant error. One source told Vanity Fair that it was “humiliating.” One interesting fact is that both women are part of the Times masthead. Grigoriadis is a contributing writer. Goldberg was just hired as a columnist for the Times Op-Ed desk, appointed by James Bennet, the editorial page editor who some think might someday succeed executive editor Dean Baquet. “The fact that they’re both affiliated with the Times is what makes it unusual,” a Times staffer told Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair also writes that now people question how this will affect Bennet, since he has faced some major issues in his short year and a half at the job — such as a defamation lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin, that was later dismissed.

One further question Vanity Fair brings up is would the mistake have happened if there was a free-standing, centralized copy desk. The copy desk was eliminated from the Times this summer. But Vanity Fair writes that some people at the Times disagreed with this thought, saying it seems unlikely “even the most assiduous copy editor” would have questioned Goldberg on some of her fundamental points.

Vanity Fair writes that at the end of the day, this is just an example of the rockiness the Times is currently going through as it makes “important and necessary changes.”

A new research paper from Leo Goldstein claims to have quantified Google’s bias against leading conservative sites—including PJ Media—in search ranking, especially (but not exclusively) in the area of climate change.

“Google Search is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains and against conservative domains with a confidence of 95%,” Goldstein found. “Further, certain hard-Left domains have such a high [percentage of domain traffic, referred by Google Search, net of brand searches] that their standing raises suspicions that they have been hand-picked for prominent placement,” he says, adding that “certain respected conservative domains are blacklisted.”

In an email to PJ Media Goldstein warned that a number of conservatives sites, including PJM, could be the victims of Google bias:

Dear Editors,

You might be interestted to learn, that your websites have been almost blacklisted by Google. “Almost blacklisted” means that Google search artificially downranks results from your websites to such extent that you lose 55% – 75% of possible visitors traffic from Google. This sitution is probably aggravated by secondary effects, because many users and webmasters see Google ranking as a signal of trust.

This result is reported in my paper published in WUWT. The findings are consistent with multiple prior results, showing Google left/liberal bias, and pro-Hillary skew of Google search in the elections.

I write to all of them to give you opportunity to discuss this matter among yourselves. Even if Google owes nothing to your publications, it certainly owes good faith to the users of its search. Intentionally hiding conservative and/or libertarian websites from the customers is an obvious breach of good faith.

He included a list of several conservative sites that may have been targeted for bias:

The almost blacklisted domains:

americanthinker.com

drudgereport.com

powerlineblog.com

pjmedia.com

thegatewaypundit.com

On average, Goldstein explained in the paper, the percentage of Google referral traffic (PGSTN) is in the 25-30 percent range for a broad class of web domains. Respected conservative sites like PJM and RedState have much lower percentages according to his findings. He based his research on the Alexa website ranking site.

On average, the conservative domains have almost two times lower PGSTN than the left/liberal ones: conservative 15.5% (standard deviation 5.1%) vs. left/liberal 27.4% (standard deviation 4.9%). Hypothesis of Google Search left/liberal bias is confirmed with a confidence of 95%.

He included this chart to demonstrate his findings:
Chart showing Google’s liberal bias Image Credit Leo Goldstein

On first glance, this sounds like a clear case of bias. However, there are some factors to consider. First, Alexa is not known to accurately reflect a site’s internal numbers, relying as it does on “estimated” metrics. PJM’s actual Google organic traffic referral percentage, for example, is higher than what Alexa reports. And Alexa’s estimate is based on their estimate of total traffic to a site. So, for example, if a site gets a large percentage of traffic from another source (e.g. Drudge or Yahoo) the percentage of Google organic traffic will naturally be lower.

In addition, Goldstein admits that he holds “short positions in Google stock,” which means he is essentially betting their stock will drop. That introduces the possibility of bias into his assessments.

Having said all that, we’ve had a significant drop in Google organic traffic here at PJM in recent months which could be the result of bias—or a number of factors. Google announced “Project Owl” earlier this year, claiming it would use a combination of algorithm tweaks and user reports to crack down on “fake news”: CONTINUES AT SITE

As Matthew Vadum notes, the violent anti-Trump groups Refuse Fascism and the Workers World Party are siding with North Korea and “spouting pro-North Korean propaganda talking points, and in at least one case, copying and pasting official North Korean statements into communiques.” As it happens, North Korean propaganda is also showing up in the establishment media.

Consider “Reunification, not war, in Korea,” a “special” piece for the Sacramento Bee on September 5, when Kim Jong-un was fondling his new hydrogen bomb. Author Geoffrey Fattig, a “former speechwriter for the U.S. State Department,” is not disturbed by “Kim Jong-un’s blatant disregard of the will of the international community,” and describes it only as “distasteful.”

So threatening the United States and its allies is a matter of taste, as Molotov once said about fascism. Fattig’s problem is Donald Trump. “Unfortunately,” he explains, “sanity doesn’t seem to be a hindrance facing our new president.” But this is no boilerplate anti-Trump screed. For former State Department speechwriter Geoffrey Fattig:

“The problem, though, is not simply or even primarily Trump. The problem is that the country he leads has shown itself to have a capacity for violence that is matched only by its ignorance of foreign affairs. North Korea is not a threat to the United States; the only reason we fought the country in the first place was because the Truman administration split the peninsula immediately after World War II, then committed U.S. troops when Kim Il-sung sought to reunify the country in 1950.”

Likewise, regarding North Korea as a threat to the United States “profoundly misjudges the nature of the regime” which is “driven by a singular goal of reunifying the Korean peninsula, a goal that cannot be achieved while U.S. troops remain stationed in South Korea.” And back stateside:

“An American public that is naturally predisposed to fear and war” supports military action against North Korea. Instead of joining this chorus, “U.S. leaders should start thinking of ways to atone for our original sin of dividing the peninsula in 1945.” And according to Geoffrey Fattig, “Kim Jong-un isn’t going anywhere, and neither is his stockpile of nuclear weapons.”

Those fearful, violent, warmongering people in Anchorage, Boise, and Baton Rouge, can be forgiven for regarding Fattig’s “special” piece as goose-stepping North Korean propaganda. The former U.S. State Department speechwriter has had a lot of practice on that theme.

Fattig’s work has often appeared on the website of the Institute for Policy Studies, an interlocking directorate of the left. Despite the North’s “military bluster,” Fattig explains in a 2013 IPS piece, “there are signs that Kim Jong-un has been cautiously embarking on economic reforms during his first year in power.” Here Fattig shows the deft touch of a Walter Duranty or Anna Louise Strong, but there’s more.

The Korean standoff will improve with “withdrawal of American military forces, a normalizing of its dysfunctional relationship with the United States, and coordinated economic assistance from its neighbors.” So just get out, give Kim Jong-un what he wants, and all will be well.

All apologies to the hard-working street-walkers and penthouse prostitutes who, unlike the modern-media harlots and rent-boys, have no illusions and offer no excuses about what they do and why.

For well over 75 years, Americans have naively trusted that the people who bring them the news every night—and today, 24/7—are highly informed, deeply sincere, remarkably unbiased public servants.

After all, why would anyone go into a notoriously low-paying profession if he or she was not at heart an idealist?

Motives, of course, vary. Some are attracted to the “profession” because they are news junkies and want to be where the political action is. Others seek the limelight because the narcissist in them likes to be on camera. Then there are those who genuinely believe that their exposés and hard-hitting reporting can make a helpful difference in people’s lives. Finally we have aspirants with money signs in their eyes, hoping that they will be among the few who actually rake in the big bucks.

But for a public who still believe the “news” they read and hear and watch is even remotely related to “the truth,” allow me to burst that bubble.

As ace journalist Ashley Lutz scrupulously documented in a Business Insider report last year, in 1983 there were 50 media companies, but today only six organizations are now responsible for 90 percent of all the “news” we read, watch and listen to! They include:

GE (Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, et al).
NewsCorp (Fox, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, et al).
Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Miramax, Marvel Studios, et al)
Viacom (MTV, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Paramount Pictures, et al)
Time Warner (CNN, HBO, TIME, Warner Bros., et al)
CBS (Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, NFL.com, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes, et al)

Make no mistake, the CEOs of these multibillion-dollar businesses are all leftist globalists—not a conservative among them—except perhaps for Rupert Murdoch (Fox, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, et al) who recently gave control of his empire to his leftist sons Lachlan and James, hence the distinctly leftward tilt of Fox and the WSJ.

Over the years, these globalist business titans have all made massive investments in the global economy, thanks largely to the leftist con men and women—the Clintons and Obamas; the communists, tin-pot dictators and America-haters of the United Nations; the leftist billionaires who thrive on and denounce capitalism at the same time—who wined and dined and charmed them into believing that America was on the decline and that the open-borders, one-world-government crowd was in imminent ascendance.

But big ideas, like the notion of a diminishing America, are never successful without the full-time help of a media that is run by—ta da—the globalists themselves!

THIS IS HOW IT WORKS

Ms. Wide-Eyed idealist and Mr. Upwardly-Mobile go-getter apply for jobs at their local or national radio or TV stations or newspapers. Or they “know someone” who facilitates an interview that leads to being hired. A good example of the latter is the nice-enough but remarkably untalented Chelsea Clinton, who landed an astronomically high-paying job with NBC that, mercifully for viewers, lasted about a minute.

Once hired, these wannabe journalists are thrilled to be on their way, until it dawns on them that their bosses don’t give a damn about anything they think or believe or want to convey to a hungry public. For most media employees, it soon becomes clear that they are expected—indeed, mandated—to reflect and convey the belief systems of their employers. And unless they do that, they are completely DISPENSABLE!