Displaying posts categorized under

MEDIA

IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Immigration: How Trump Derangement Syndrome Dumbs Down the Press By Roger L Simon

By on August 3rd, 2017

How many IQ points do you lose from Trump Derangement Syndrome or similar conditions of blind political rage?

I was asking myself that while listening to the stupefying question asked of Trump adviser Stephen Miller by CNN’s Jim Acosta at Wednesday’s White House press conference. Miller had been explaining — with a level of clarity and specificity not often seen at these events — the immigration proposal being proffered by Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue and now being backed by the president. The press audience appeared impatient with these details, however, waiting to pounce as it almost always does.

And the pounce came from Acosta, who was irked the proposal listed some level of facility with the English language as one of the new preference points for possible immigration applicants. Wasn’t that de facto discrimination in favor of people from the UK and Australia (read: white skin privilege)?

Earth to Acosta: As of 2015, there were 54 sovereign states and 27 non-sovereign entities where English was an official language. These include India (population: 1,247,540,000), Pakistan (199,085,847), Nigeria (182,202,000), the Philippines (102,885,100), Tanzania (51,820,000) and Kenya (45,010,056) among, obviously, many others. In China (population 1.39 billion), almost all school children begin English in the third grade. In Japan, South Korea and Singapore, it’s also mandatory beginning about the same time. Anyone who’s been to Europe recently knows it’s hard to find anyone under fifty in those countries now who doesn’t speak some degree of English. I could go on, but it’s pointless. English has become, for all intents and purposes, the world lingua franca. The number of possible immigrants from the UK and Australia is less than minuscule by comparison and the implication of racism (hidden in plain sight in Acosta’s question) therefore ludicrous. It’s the opposite.

So, assuming he didn’t have a lobotomy on the way to the press conference, what made the CNN reporter so (to be blunt) catastrophically uninformed that he would ask such a thing?

Answer: a cocktail of blind rage, the overwhelming self-centered need for you and your side always to be right with (for bitters) a healthy splash of malignant moral narcissism. In 2017, that’s called “The Trump,” served neat or on-the-rocks and stronger even than Dorothy Parker’s martini. Two glasses and the only word left in your vocabulary is “Russia,” three and it’s “impeachment” (slurred heavily). Rational discussion has gone out the window. It isn’t even a possibility.

I could say it’s unfair to Acosta to single him out, but it’s really not. He has been especially bad, ensconced in a front-row seat at these events as if he were a wannabe starlet preening for a photo opportunity. (“Are you watching, Mr. DeMille?”) He was also constitutionally incapable of letting Miller speak for fear, as is so often the case, he would have to deal with what Miller was actually saying.

But the real loser in all this is not Acosta or even CNN. It’s the American people who learn less than zero from the press conferences, in fact are brutally misled by our media in a wanton and selfish matter. It’s all about them and not one jot about informing their audience. In fact, there is an almost palpable rejection of the latter because then they (that unwashed audience) might see something, anything, good in what Trump or one of his minions might be proposing. That is not allowed to happen under any circumstances. Dialogue nyet!

The immigration question on the table Wednesday is an excellent case in point. Miller was treating the press (and the television audience) as adults, carefully explaining the administration’s rationale for the proposal. It is their contention that some restriction on immigration is greatly for the benefit of the many unemployed American citizens already here — particularly minorities. Blacks and Latinos have the most to gain from this. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

The Seth Rich case is back on the front burner – and it now involves the Trump White House! By Peter Barry Chowka

By on August 3rd, 2017

After lying dormant for several months, the unsolved cold-case brutal murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was front and center once again, yesterday[1]. Rich was shot in the back as he was walking to his apartment in Washington, D.C. in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016.

It fell to taxpayer-funded NPR to drop the story and introduce the latest spin on it, which it did on its Tuesday Morning Edition program accompanied by a lengthy article, “Behind Fox News’ Baseless Seth Rich Story: The Untold Tale.”

Bringing the tale back to life with a startling new anti-Trump angle this time was a defamation and discrimination lawsuit filed in federal court in New York City later Tuesday morning by attorneys representing Rod Wheeler, the former Washington, D.C. homicide detective, which NPR had an advance and “exclusive” look at. Wheeler was suing his current employer, the Fox News Channel; 21st Century Fox; Malia Zimmerman, a Fox News reporter; and a Republican operative named Ed Butowsky for a variety of alleged offenses.

A Fox News contributor since 2005 who was paid for his occasional on-air reporting and commentary on crime cases, Wheeler quickly achieved his 15 minutes of fame – that was over within one week – last May when he emerged as the person hired by Seth Rich’s family to investigate Rich’s unsolved murder. In several on-camera interviews, initially with the local Fox channel in Washington, D.C. and the next day with his employer the Fox News Channel (which took the story national), Wheeler claimed that he had uncovered evidence that lent credence to the previously unpopular theory, pushed by independent conservative media, that Rich had been taken out because he might have been the source of DNC emails leaked to WikiLeaks in July 2016 that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign and resulted in the resignation of DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz.

For example, on May 15, Fox 5 D.C. reported the following conversation with Wheeler:

FOX 5 DC: “You have sources at the FBI saying that there is information…”

WHEELER: “For sure…”

FOX 5 DC: “…that could link Seth Rich to WikiLeaks?”

WHEELER: “Absolutely. Yeah. That’s confirmed.”

The following day, Wheeler appeared by remote from D.C. on several Fox News channel programs broadcast from New York, including Hannity. Wheeler told Sean Hannity:

When you look at that with the totality of everything else that I found in this case, it’s very consistent for a person with my experience to begin to think, well, perhaps there were some email communications between Seth and WikiLeaks. Every time I talk with the police department, though, Sean, every time I talk with the police department about the WikiLeaks or the emails, it’s automatically shut down. That discussion is automatically shut down.

The six-minute video of Wheeler’s May 16 Hannity interview is online here, and since May 16, Fox News has also had it online here.

Continue reading →
MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas From Ragged Centre to Flush Left

By on August 1st, 2017

The Australian has largely resisted the smothering green/left orthodoxy that banished all dissenting perspectives from the Fairfax rags and ABC. When age or ailment sees Rupert Murdoch’s guiding hand lifted from his paper’s helm, don’t expect things to stay that way. The Weekend Review is the sad preview.

The Australian is normally a voice for sanity in this country’s political debate. But Editor-in-Chief Paul Whittaker really ought to take a look at what goes into the Review magazine inside The Weekend Australian – editor Michelle Gunn.

On the same day the paper hit the streets on Saturday, July 29, Sydney counter-terror operatives were arresting four Islamists over an alleged plot to bring down a domestic airliner with an explosive device. This alleged plot was the thirteenth thwarted in the past three years. Had it succeeded, hundreds of deaths would have traumatised the country .

Now turn to page 22 of Review (editor Tim Douglas, and Literary Editor Stephen Romei, who staff say selects the book reviewers)), in which fantasy novelist and journalist Claire Corbett reviews three books on counter-terror units, including Sons of God about the Victorian Special Operations Group and two about the US Navy SEALS, The Killing School and The Operator. She writes,

“As historian Yuval Noah Harari points out in his 2015 book Homo Deus terrorists have almost no capacity to threaten a functioning state. The danger comes most from our over-reactions.

‘Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about three million people,’ Harari writes,’ terrorists killed a total of 7697 people across the globe , most of them in developing countries.’[1] He notes that for the average person in the affluent West, soft drinks pose a far deadlier threat than terrorists.” (My emphases).

Thanks for that, Claire Corbett, and thanks for your second-hand imbecility about soft drinks’ deadly threat. But no thanks, Review editors, for allowing Corbett/Harari to trash The Australian’s reputation for intellectual rigor, let alone common sense.

Let’s see what else Harari’s on about (not mentioned by Corbett) besides deadly soft drinks. He’s a history professor of repute and celebrity at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, “probably the most fashionable thinker on the planet right now,” according to the Daily Mail.

Writing only a month ago, after the Manchester slaughter, he claims that Britons need to accept that terrorists may kill a few people a year.

‘The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it. I mean, the terrorist attacks themselves are of course horrific, and I don’t intend to minimise the tragedy of the people who are killed, but if you look at the big picture it’s a puny threat…

For every person who is killed by a terrorist in the UK there are at least 100 who die in car accidents. Nevertheless, terrorism manages to capture our imagination in a way that car accidents don’t. You kill 20 people and you have 60 million people frightened that there is a terrorist behind every tree. That causes them to over-react. To do things like persecute entire communities, invade countries, go to war, change our way of life in terms of human rights and privacy, because of a tiny threat…

We have to give up this idea that we can completely abolish terrorism and that even the tiniest attack is completely unacceptable. You have domestic violence or rape and we don’t say, “Let’s have a curfew: men are not allowed on the street after eight o’clock.” If we could have such an attitude towards terrorism – “OK, every year there are two, three or four incidents of terrorism, a couple of dozen people get killed, it’s terrible, but OK, we get on with our lives” – it will be a far more effective response.’

In 2015, he was saying “Most terrorist attacks kill only a handful of people.”

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

What Happens When an Imam Calls for Killing Jews How the Left covered up Muslim anti-Semitism in California. July 31, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

By on July 31st, 2017

On Friday July 21st, Imam Ammar Shahin delivered a sermon at the Islamic Center of Davis calling for the extermination of the Jews. He quoted an infamous Islamic Hadith which claims that Judgement Day won’t come around until the Muslims hunt down and exterminate the Jews.

“Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews,” he prayed. “Annihilate them down to the very last one,” he added.

Next Friday, after the video went viral, the Imam appeared at a press conference to apologize to the filthy Jews. “I said things that were hurtful to Jews.”

The whole thing was sanctified by Rabbi Seth Castleman, a former Buddhist monk married to the Rev. Elizabeth Griswold, the pastor of Parkside Community Church. Castleman leads Buddhist meditation sessions at his current house of worship. When bacon was dumped on the Islamic Center, Castleman appeared and declared that, “Attacks such as this one are a strike against all of us.”

“Look, the Old and New Testaments have horrible things in them,” Castleman had opined in response to the imam’s anti-Semitic rant. “You can always find horrible things.”

The Islamic Center of Davis had tried to claim that the Imam’s rant had been taken out of context. “If the sermon was misconstrued, we sincerely apologize to anyone offended,” it offered.

“It’s unfair when I have spoken about nonviolence, and here is some two minutes. My record is very clear, I have always been against violence,” Imam Shahin told the Washington Post.

At the press conference, he conceded that his words might have encouraged violent acts. The farce finally came to an end with a halting apology delivered from a written statement in broken English.

Then he committed to fighting for “social justice” and against “hate speech and violence”.

Imam Shahin’s apology was preceded by an address from a senior minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church who denounced “the language that we hear coming from the highest office in our country.”

When an Imam spews hate at Jews, the left will go right back to attacking President Trump.

The diverse clergy and community leaders at the event were more than happy to give Shahin a pass. And Shahin blamed the whole thing on his “emotions”. It went without saying that a Christian leader calling for Muslim genocide would not have been allowed to use his overwrought “feelings” as an excuse.

While the media had rushed to cover the Islamic Center of Davis’ bacon scandal, the same outlets had far less interest in the Center’s anti-Semitism problem. At first the story could only be found in Jewish and conservative outlets. When the media was finally forced to cover the viral video, it made excuses.

MEMRI, the monitoring organization that found, translated and uploaded the video, was smeared. Since Shahin’s remarks had been translated, challenging the translation was the easiest way to shoot the messenger. The Islamic Center accused MEMRI of having mistranslated “destroy” as “annihilate”.

And it attacked MEMRI for not having featured the ”countless lectures and sermons he has given regarding treating all people, especially non-Muslims, with kindness.”

Why indeed didn’t MEMRI highlight all the lectures in which he didn’t call for genocide?

The Muslim Public Affairs Council put out a statement complaining that, “Groups like MEMRI exacerbate political divisions on the Middle East conflict rather than aim to reconcile differences.” And who better to bring us together than MPAC whose boss had accused Israel of being behind the 9/11 attacks.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Western Media Eliminating ‘Temple Mount’ By Susan D. Harris

By on July 31st, 2017

“In short, we are to think of it primarily as a sacred Islamic Jerusalem shrine that the Jews falsely lay claim to. In order to accomplish this, the term “Temple Mount” must be stealthily eradicated.”

There is a subtle repositioning in process by the mainstream media to influence the way people think – or don’t think — about the Temple Mount. In short, we are to think of it primarily as a sacred Islamic Jerusalem shrine that the Jews falsely lay claim to. In order to accomplish this, the term “Temple Mount” must be stealthily eradicated.

Drudge Report first caught my attention with the July 14th headline: “2 Israeli policemen killed in shooting near Jerusalem shrine.” I wondered, “What Jerusalem shrine?” Surely if it were the Temple Mount it would say so. The headline linked to an AP story which told me in the first paragraph that it was a “major Jerusalem shrine,” (at this point I wondered why they were hedging about the location.) The second paragraph told me it was a “sacred site” … which in American lingo is starting to sound like an Indian burial ground somewhere in the Old West. The next thing I read is that it is known to Muslims as the “Noble Sanctuary.” Huh. I guess that would be…yep…now the article tells me it’s known to Jews as the “Temple Mount.” There you have it! It took three paragraphs but the Associated Press finally connected this vague sacred site to the Jewish people — after first telling us it is revered by Muslims.

The same day, British daily The Guardian told us by their second paragraph that the attack occurred “in the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif complex.” Before the paragraph is over however, Muslims again get first dibs as it’s described as being “revered as a holy site by both Muslims and Jews.”

Two days later, CNN took a more serious tone as they reported the Israeli policemen were killed “just outside one of the world’s most important religious sites.” In keeping with framing the Temple Mount as firstly a Muslim site and secondly a Jewish site, CNN falls in step saying the attack was “next to what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount.”

July 21st Reuters followed suit. In their article titled, “Jerusalem on alert as religious tensions rise over holy site,” the first paragraph dips its toe in the water referencing only a “sensitive holy site.” By the second paragraph we’ve waded into the pool as we’re told the “shrine” is the Muslim’s “Noble Sanctuary,” followed by a mention of the Jew’s “Temple Mount” — as if they were second in line with squatter’s rights. Now officially drowning in chaos, the London based news service decides to go with “Noble Sanctuary-Temple Mount compound.”

Also July 21st, Fox News joined the club with a headline about the “holy shrine tension.” Almost laughably, it tells it’s apparently not too worldly-wise readers about a “long-contested shrine near the Lion’s Gate in Jerusalem.” Once again, Muslims are named first when discussing the “volatile Jerusalem shrine, revered by Muslims and Jews alike.”

The same day, Britain’s Telegraph chased its tail as it reported, “Palestinian gunmen ambushed and killed two Israeli police officers at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on Friday, bringing bloodshed and chaos to a religious site that is sacred to both Jews and Muslims.”

VOA (Voice of America) News got the memo as well.

It seems obvious that the site formerly called the “Temple Mount” by Western media is not the preferred name of the “holy site,” “sacred site,” “holy place,” “holy shrine,” “Jerusalem shrine,” that is known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

A search on an American/Canadian newspaper archive – holding nearly 40 million newspapers dating back to the 1800’s — returned 1,933 “Temple Mount” results, and only 86 “Noble Sanctuary” results. The phrase “Temple Mount” spanned the years. However, while a few of the “Noble Sanctuary” results were from the late 19th Century, the rest were mostly from the year 2000 onward.

(And it wasn’t just websites and newspapers. I heard numerous radio news reports referencing it as the Muslims’ Noble Sanctuary before mentioning it was “also a Jewish holy site.”)

While the United Nations has been pushing the narrative that the Jerusalem holy site is “Muslim, not Jewish” for years, it should be troubling to those who support Jewish claims to the site that even the most conservative Western media are now falling in lockstep with UN talking points.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media’s Embellisher-in-Chief A newsman with a Godlike baritone who was a star in every medium—and also made stuff up. Edward Kosner reviews ‘The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism’ by Mitchell Stephens.

By on July 29th, 2017

Among the celebrated people in America in the 1920s and ’30s were Franklin Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, Shirley Temple, Jack Dempsey, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby—and Lowell Thomas. All those names still resonate—except Thomas, for decades the “Voice of God” in network newscasting, now a curious footnote in the frisky history of American journalism.

In his heyday, Thomas (1892-1981) was almost impossible to miss. He sold out huge concert halls with his exotic travelogues—the first mixed-media shows, dressed up with music, hand-tinted slides and quick snatches of film, some of which he shot himself from airplanes. His nightly radio newscasts often drew more listeners than “Amos ’n’ Andy,” the most popular show in America. His narrator’s voice on Fox Movietone News boomed out in jammed newsreel theaters before television took over. And when NBC started the first commercial TV station, W2XBS in New York, Thomas made the first newscast, from the World’s Fair in 1939, and the next year was the host of the first regularly scheduled program, a 15-minute news show.

The wonder of it all—or perhaps the explanation—is that Lowell Thomas, in the early days of his career and later in his double-barreled memoirs, elaborated and embroidered his stories and simply made stuff up. He was, in old-school newspaper argot, a “pipe artist.” He made millions by entertaining millions and often informing them in the bargain.

The Voice of America

By Mitchell Stephens

St. Martin’s, 328 pages, $26.99

Now Mitchell Stephens, an accomplished chronicler of journalism, has resurrected Thomas from what might be considered well-earned obscurity. And it’s fair to ask if the subtitle of his biography, “The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism,” is a sly wink at its subject’s penchant for making a good story even better.

Thomas’s industrious ancestors had come to America in the 17th century, and he seems to have been born on the make. The son of a doctor obsessed with self-improvement and an attentive mother, Thomas grew up in a honky-tonk gold-rush town on the western slope of Pikes Peak in Colorado. His father drilled him in elocution, and at 9 he stood on long lines twice to shake hands with and chat up the touring Vice President Teddy Roosevelt. By 19, he was the editor of his hometown paper, the Victor Record, writing headlines like “Mayor’s Nephew Shot in Love Nest.” (The youth was shot, all right, but turned out not to be related to the mayor.) Thomas quickly picked up two degrees at the University of Denver, then headed off to Chicago for law school.

But even before enrolling, he got a job on the Chicago Daily Journal, sitting next to Ben Hecht, the roistering epitome of the harum-scarum Chicago newspapering he later confected into “The Front Page.” Whether under Hecht’s tutelage or not, Thomas soon fit right in. Within a year, the Journal splashed his “exclusive” interview with a supposedly insane young heiress who was being held captive by her family after chasing her new husband with a knife and threatening suicide. The heiress was real enough; the interview wasn’t. There was a stink, but Thomas survived. In his spare time, he took law classes and taught public speaking to his fellow students. He was 21.

By the time he was 25, Mr. Stephens recounts, Thomas had studied for a Ph.D. and joined the faculty at Princeton and twice traveled to Alaska and the Yukon, returning with slides and film for lectures. Then he decided to cover World War I—raising $900,000 in today’s money from a group of Chicago investors with the sales pitch that his stories and illustrated lectures would build support for the war effort.

In Europe with his cameraman, Thomas heard that the British had captured Jerusalem and sped there. One day he spotted a diminutive Englishman resplendent in Arab garb walking on the street and stopped to chat. It was Maj. T.E. Lawrence—and before long Thomas would turn Lawrence and himself into international stars.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

The Left’s War on the First Amendment … and the crisis of an illiberal media. Daniel Greenfield

By on July 28th, 2017

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. Like most left-leaning institutions it worked hard to prove its progressive premises. Democrats were good and Republicans bad. The police and the military were bad. Social welfare spending and diplomacy were good. Israel was bad and the PLO was good.

This was the thing we used to nostalgically call media bias.

We aren’t dealing with a liberal media anymore, but an illiberal media. The liberal media was content to use its institutional power as a megaphone to broadcast its views. But you could debate those views. Actual conservatives were allowed to write columns, and not just as a strategic attack on some element of the GOP the way it is now, and appear on television to offer opinions, and not just as punching bags.

The liberal media was convinced it would win the argument because it was right.

The illiberal media isn’t interested in winning an argument, but in silencing the opposition. It doesn’t just want to shout louder than you. It wants to use its institutional power to shut you up.

This isn’t just a media phenomenon. It’s what happened across the social spectrum when the people we used to call liberals became illiberal leftists. It’s why colleges censor controversial speakers and punish dissenting faculty. It’s why the environmental debate went from scientific discussions to calls to punish, fine and even jail those who question the left’s Luddite alarmism on Global Warming.

It’s why the debate over gay marriage shifted to punishing Christian bakers and florists, the arguments about Israel tilted to preventing musicians from performing in Tel Aviv and civil rights turned into a call to create “safe spaces” that ban everyone else. Diversity is no longer dressed up as an expansion, but is now explicitly a contraction. Don’t read books by white authors. Don’t hire more men. Kick Jews out of the gay rights rally. Send the IRS after conservative groups. Punch a Trump supporter in the face.

Nearly every leftist cause these days is expressed by punishing someone. Arguments are won by force. The illiberal totalitarian lurking inside the liberal, as David Horowitz described it, is out of the closet.

It’s a lot easier to spot illiberalism in the press and academia because they depend on the free exchange of ideas. It’s hard to spot creeping totalitarianism at the DMV or in any government bureaucracy. But it’s really easy to see the change on a college campus or in the pages of your local newspaper.

And that’s where the iron curtain truly falls on the First Amendment.

The modern campus is mired in trigger warnings and safe spaces. Faculty and administrators are lynched, buildings are burned, students are assaulted and dissent is ruthlessly silenced.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Radical Left-Wing Ha’aretz Columnist Gideon Levi Justifies Terrorism, Again A twisted interpretation of a horrific tragedy. Roni Bialer

By on July 27th, 2017

In a recent op-ed in the left wing newspaper Ha’aretz, Gideon Levi called on all ‘honest Israelis’ to read the Facebook suicide note of the Palestinian who brutally stabbed three Israelis to death last Friday night as they were eating the Sabbath dinner.

Levi hopes that Israelis who read this facebook suicide note will gain a better understanding of the reality the Palestinians live in and the issues that drive them to violence. If Levi’s desire for both Israelis and Palestinians to understand the other was genuine, that would be a praiseworthy aspiration, and his call to Israelis to understand the Palestinians should be taken seriously. Yet, Levi has a certain narrative that he has forced down the throats of Israelis and readers abroad for years, blaming Israelis for Palestinian violence and terror, be it because of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), IDF military operations, or any Israeli policy that upsets the Palestinians. And here, with the latest terror attack, Levi once again attempts to pump that narrative, convinced of its truth, even though in the process he is forced to bend and twist the words of the Palestinians themselves.

One example is that Levi says that the terrorist – Omar Al-Abed – wanted to kill ‘settlers’ (i.e., Jews living in Judea and Samaria). However, in the Facebook post (full translation at the end of the article) that Al-Abed wrote prior to the attack, settlers are never mentioned. Instead the terrorist mentions killing ‘Jews’ (in general) while using the ancient Muslim slur calling the Jews ‘monkeys and pigs’.

Levi also asserts that the terrorist acted as a result of ‘the magno-meters placed on the Temple Mount’, ‘the killing and torturing of Palestinians’, and ‘the destruction of Palestinian property and arrests’. This leads the reader to believe that the terrorist had a list of grievances, and his actions were an outcome of these feelings which could no longer be suppressed. Thus, the current terrorist is not a religious fanatic who decides to kill Jews one morning, he is a calculated person, with a deep political understanding. Yet in reality, none of these accusations are mentioned in the Facebook post, Al-Abed simply says that the motivation for the attack was that the “Al Aqsa mosque was closed to the Muslims.” Furthermore, this supposedly intelligent person, is a 19 year old who writes a will or suicide note with spelling mistakes, smiley faces, and hearts.

Needless to say, the reports accusing Israel of ‘closing’ the Al Aqsa Mosque to Muslims were completely false. The purpose of these media reports, happily disseminated by Al Jazeera, Arab MKs, the Palestinian Authority and other media sites, was to incite and instigate young Palestinians to violence and terror. Israeli security officials at the entrance to the Temple Mount actually tried to convince young Muslims to enter the compound to pray, yet they refused. The video below, from the international Arab TV station Al-Arabiyah depicts this refusal. To make things worse, Arab reporters who reported that Israel was permitting Muslims to pray in the Al Aqsa mosque were criticized of being treasonous. For example, Ziad Halabi, a Palestinian nationalist, reporting live of Israel’s efforts to convince young Palestinians to enter the Temple Mount to pray, was the subject of a flood of curses and threats from the Arab media claiming that he had “lied and distorted reality.”

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

That Joe and Mika New York Magazine Cover Is Why Everyone Hates the Media When journalists willingly make themselves the center of the story, ordinary voters shake their heads in disgust. By Tiana Lowe

By on July 26th, 2017

Once upon a time, the greatest sin journalists could commit was to make themselves a part of the story. On Sunday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski did just that, soaking up the fluorescent spotlight on the cover of New York magazine and dishing about their “star-crossed relationship with the president” — and, of course, each other — in its pages.

During trying times, contentiousness between the press and the president has often morphed into spectacle, with anchors such as Sam Donaldson receiving flak from the public for seeming to enter the political arena rather than report or comment on it. With the advent of social media, the lines between reporting, commentary, analysis, and activism were blurred, and they’ve been obliterated by the crossover of celebrity into politics. First there was Al Franken. Now, there is Trump. Soon, there might be Senator Kid Rock. So it makes sense that reporters will become unwittingly entangled in the political fray. We saw as much with Megyn Kelly, who became a political lightning rod overnight following Trump’s deeply personal attacks on her moderation of the first Republican primary debate.

In all fairness — or depending on whether you believe that Morning Joe’s fluffy platforming helped him win the Republican nomination — Trump sort of started it. In his petty, derisive, unpresidential tweet-storm last month, he attacked Brzezinski’s appearance and Scarborough’s sanity, and immediately after the fact, the pair responded with a measured defense in the Washington Post. They seemed to rise above the pathetic occasion and take Trump’s bullying in stride. At first.

Earlier this month, Scarborough published a high-and-mighty critique of the GOP, notable only for what it unwittingly revealed about its author. No, the former Republican congressman did not object to Trump’s denouncing John McCain for being captured in the line of duty during the Vietnam War. He did not declare the Republican party shot when it chose Trump as its nominee. He reached his breaking point only once the personal became political.

The next stop on Joe and Mika’s media junket was The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, in which the duo discussed the vicissitudes of journalism in the 24-hour news cycle, the ethics of sourcing, and their own relationship, making a few obvious Trump jokes along the way. At the end, Joe even got to debut a song from his new dad-rock album!

Their New York magazine cover, then, really shouldn’t be shocking, yet somehow, it is.

It’s not that journalists and commentators should exist in the shadows, especially when Trump pulls them into the arena. Jake Tapper and Megyn Kelly have both recently been featured and glamorized in monthly magazines, but in each case they discussed their roles as journalists, not as the leaders of an opposition or resistance movement. Mika and Joe, meanwhile, used the opportunity to embrace their roles in the cheap soap opera of petty palace intrigue.

“At one point, Joe sent me a Snapchat and Donald was on top, and then he sent me another one and Melania was!” Brzezinski gushed about her pet bunnies, not-at-all-creepily named after the president and first lady, to Olivia Nuzzi, the magazine’s Washington correspondent. The nearly 6,000-word cover story is rife with such anecdotes. Scarborough makes sure to get in a plug for his album, discussing the process of writing a love song for Brzezinski. She makes sure to flaunt her “large diamond solitaire” and play with his hair in front of Nuzzi. They both express shock and awe that Trump remained, well, himself as he progressed from candidate to president. Barely half of the feature covers the pair’s dealings with the president. The rest reads like an incredibly nuanced analysis of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Silicon Valley Censorship by Samuel Westrop

By on July 26th, 2017

If it is ever “toxic” to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then — regardless of whether that is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm — the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist. The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

Conservative news, it seems, is considered fake news. Liberals should oppose this dogma before their own news comes under attack. Again, the most serious problem with attempting to eliminate hate speech, fake news or terrorist content by censorship is not about the efficacy of the censorship; it is the very premise that is dangerous.

Under the guidance of faulty algorithms or prejudiced Silicon Valley programmers, when the New York Times starts to delete or automatically hide comments that criticize extremist clerics, or Facebook designates articles by anti-Islamist activists as “fake news,” Islamists will prosper and moderate Muslims will suffer.

Google’s latest project is an application called Perspective, which, as Wired reports, brings the tech company “a step closer to its goal of helping to foster troll-free discussion online, and filtering out the abusive comments that silence vulnerable voices.” In other words, Google is teaching computers how to censor.

If Google’s plans are not quite Orwellian enough for you, the practical results are rather more frightening. Released in February, Perspective’s partners include the New York Times, the Guardian, Wikipedia and the Economist. Google, whose motto is “Do the Right Thing,” is aiming its bowdlerism at public comment sections on newspaper websites, but the potential is far broader.

Perspective works by identifying the “toxicity level” of comments published online. Google states that Perspective will enable companies to “sort comments more effectively, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information.” Perspective’s demonstration website currently allows anyone to measure the “toxicity” of a word or phrase, according to its algorithm. What, then, constitutes a “toxic” comment?

The organization with which I work, the Middle East Forum, studies Islamism. We work to tackle the threat posed by both violent and non-violent Islamism, assisted by our Muslim allies. We believe that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Perspective does not look fondly at our work:

Google’s Perspective application, which is being used by major media outlets to identify the “toxicity level” of comments published online, has much potential for abuse and widespread censorship.

No reasonable person could claim this is hate speech. But the problem does not just extend to opinions. Even factual statements are deemed to have a high rate of “toxicity.” Google considers the statement “ISIS is a terrorist group” to have an 87% chance of being “perceived as toxic.”

Or 92% “toxicity” for stating the publicly-declared objective of the terrorist group, Hamas:

Google is quick to remind us that we may disagree with the result. It explains that, “It’s still early days and we will get a lot of things wrong.” The Perspective website even offers a “Seem Wrong?” button to provide feedback.

These disclaimers, however, are very much beside the point. If it is ever “toxic” to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then — regardless of whether that figure is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm — the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist.

The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

Continue reading →