RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thursday evening, CBS’s Scott Pelley, who officially ended his tenure as the network’s Evening News anchor the following evening, told viewers that “It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.”

It’s clear from Pelley’s subsequent commentary that his answers to all three elements are “Yes.” It’s equally clear from the examples he supplied as support that he sees (or wants viewers to see) the problem as predominantly about the conduct of those on the right.

Transcript below:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress, yesterday, was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow, have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Yesterday was not the first time.

In December last year, a man with an assault rifle stormed into a Washington-area pizzeria to free child sex slaves whom Hillary Clinton was holding there — or at least that’s what political blog sites had said. He fired into a locked door to discover no children in chains.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” The shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

In February, the president tweeted that the news media were the “enemy of the American people”:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. Then he said, “No, that doesn’t worry me.”

“Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.”

…..Ronald Reagan’s optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.

Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letters section in The New York Times—virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn’t a miracle; it’s a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, “I don’t agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it.” You don’t hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if you don’t agree. And they are having some success.

But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump’s supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka’s company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market alright—half the country!

Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.

As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That’s not a coincidence. In this, I’m reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people’s wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.

Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.

As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.

Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious.

One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one-sided that last August I wrote a column on the unprecedented bias. Under the headline “American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes,” I wrote that the so-called cream of the media crop was “engaged in a naked display of partisanship” designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast. Day in, day out, in every media market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction—toward Clinton and away from Trump.

For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.

On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds during the campaign. But from the beginning there was also a second element to the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.

But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that’s actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn’t cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn’t be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you’ve already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clinton was “normal” and Trump was not.

I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I’ll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter had nailed his own thinking. Trump “challenged our language,” he said, and Trump “will have changed journalism.” Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet had this to say: “I think that Trump has ended that struggle. . . . We now say stuff. We fact check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false.”

Baquet was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without consequence.

TO BE A woman is to be interrupted.

Correction: To be female is to be interrupted. By the time most girls reach their first day of school, they already know how it feels to be drowned out by a chattering group of boys.

From classrooms to corporate workspace to the chambers of the US Supreme Court, women often find themselves asking a question or making a salient point when a man decides that what he has to say is more important. Maybe she “isn’t telling the story the right way,” which means his way. Most threatening of all, she may be challenging him in a way he simply can’t abide.

There’s a word for it: “manterrupting,” a cultural sibling of the equally annoying “mansplaining.” And there’s even an app for that: Woman Interrupted, which tracks how many times a man cuts off a woman in a conversation.

The author of the piece, Renée Graham, is a feminist. Although men are not allowed to comment on women and their issues, she clearly believes she knows exactly how we think. Who gave her that insight into the male psyche? Well, she did, of course. After all, she’s a woman. And women are now deemed superior beings, whereas men are little more than cockroaches.

One of the examples she offers of “manterrupting” is this:

Women seethed when Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor who now represents California in the Senate, was forced to end her tough questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions during a hearing on possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. When Sessions sputtered, “I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous,” John McCain and Richard Burr swooped in quickly to cut Harris off. One might have thought “nervous” was Sessions’s safe word.

According to Graham, it was the second time a man had the audacity to “shut down” Senator Harris. In both cases she firmly believes that the reason for it was, wait for it, her being a woman.

After this latest incident, her colleague Ron Wyden tweeted: “Again [Harris] was doing her job. She was interrupted for asking tough questions.”

Harris was also interrupted because she’s a woman.

Nonsense. Harris was interrupted because she went berserk during the hearings. It doesn’t matter that she’s a woman; what matters is that she’s a leftist hack who uses her power and influence to discredit Republicans. There’s literally nobody who is thinking about her reproductive organs — well, except for gender-obsessed leftists like Ms. Graham, that is.

“A New York Times story about alleged Trump team contacts with Russian officials was “in the main not true.” (The New York Post quoting James Comey, 6/8.)

Now over to the opposite end of the media’s political spectrum:

“The assumption of the critics of the president, of his pursuers (especially the New York Times) …is that somewhere along the line in the last year the president had something to do with colluding with the Russians…and yet what came apart this morning was that theory,” (Chris Matthews, MSNBC 6/8.)

In brief, after last week’s Senate hearings it looks like we have (at least a semblance) of a media consensus regarding the famous claims by The New York Times against Trump and his team. The claims involved “collusion” with the Russians—and they appear bogus.

Interestingly, earlier this week in an editorial, The New York Times bewailed the lack of collusion between Trump and Russia’s historic colluders on our doorstep.

“To the long list of Barack Obama’s major initiatives that President Trump is obsessed with reversing, we may soon be able to add Cuba…Mr. Trump promised in his campaign to return to a more hard-line approach. If he does, as seems likely, he will further isolate America, hurt American business interests and, quite possibly, impede the push for greater democracy on the Caribbean island.” (New York Times, 6/5)

It’s a fascinating thing to watch. And it never fails. Let the issue of American “robber-barons” doing business with the Stalinist/kleptocratic Castro family (who already stole $8 billion from U.S. businessmen and tortured and murdered a few who resisted the burglary)—let this issue pop-up and presto!

Like clockwork, the most historically pinko, the most relentlessly anti-business entities in the U.S.– from Bernie Sanders to the New York Times—the very folks who habitually foam-at-the-mouth for keelhauling and tar & feathering all “greedy businessmen!” suddenly morph into Calvin Coolidge.

Recall President Coolidge’s famous (and universally denounced by liberals) quip: “The business of America is business.” Let’s also throw in General Motors’ CEO Charlie Wilson’s famous, “if it’s good for GM it’s good for America-and vice versa.” You might call these the favorite captions when liberal demonize “greedy U.S. robber-barons!”

It’s official – according to the New York Times. The “newspaper of record,” citing a June 14 article by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine, reports that the Fox News Channel (FNC) has retired its motto of “Fair & Balanced,” which it had used prominently since the channel started in 1996. Back then, FNC founder Roger Ailes came up with the slogan to distinguish the channel from its competitors, CNN and MSNBC, and the rest of the mainstream media, which Ailes and millions of Americans considered to be biased in favor of the left.

The slogan “Fair & Balanced” hung on until last August when, according to an unnamed source cited by Sherman, it was quietly ditched because of its association with Ailes. The founder of FNC had become persona non grata after being unceremoniously removed from Fox News the month before as a result of allegations that he had sexually harassed a number of female Fox employees. (Allegations, it should be noted, that were denied by Ailes and his representatives and that were never heard in a court of law.)

The new Fox News motto is “Most Watched, Most Trusted.”

In terms of “most watched,” it is true that ratings for Fox News held strong through May of this year. But in the wake of the 2017 departures of marquee talent including Bill O’Reilly in April, and Fox News co-president Bill Shine, an Ailes loyalist, in May, FNC’s ratings are not the consistent powerhouse they once were.

For example, the latest posted cable news ratings for Tuesday June 13, a day that was slightly unusual because of live coverage of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions Senate hearings that ran until after 5 PM EDT, are mixed news for FNC. In the prime time total viewers category, Fox beat MSNBC by 276,000 viewers – 2.888 million to 2.612 million. Third place CNN was far behind in prime time with only1.124 million. In the so-called demo (viewers 25-54 that advertisers prefer and that determine a channel’s ad rates), MSNBC was first with 620,000 viewers followed by Fox (592,000) and CNN (448,000).

The number one show in all of cable news prime time – this is becoming a trend – was uber liberal Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC at 9 PM EDT with 743,000 viewers in the demo, beating FNC’s The Five by 232,000 viewers. CNN at 9 PM was a distant also-ran. Maddow also had the largest number of total viewers (all ages) with 3.055 million of them. This number beat Maddow’s FNC competition, The Five, which had 2.695 million viewers.

Also worth reporting about in the view of many is the already faltering career of Megyn Kelly, the one-time Fox News superstar who quit Fox for NBC last January with high hopes of maybe being the next Oprah or Barbara Walters. Kelly’s new prime time NBC network show, Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly, premiered on June 4, but its second run on June 11 had half as many total viewers and came in second to CBS News’s five decade old newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

CNN’s news is fake news. CNN’s stories are lies. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is an exposed plagiarizer, but beyond all that, CNN anchors are the worst hypocrites on the air. Legitimate journalists present the news fairly regardless of their personal political views. CNN “journalists” still need safe spaces if someone criticizes Obama yet they endorse every vile lie and vicious action against Trump. CNN anchors are the talking puppets of their corporate owners who are driven by a singular ambition – to overthrow the America-first government of President Donald Trump. The globalists who own CNN want an internationalized America – they do not want a strong, independent, sovereign America led by an America-first President. They want a weak, internationalized socialized America with globalized trade agreements that benefit themselves at the expense of American workers.

The overpaid CNN bobbleheads deliberately create confusion with their unremitting lies and outrageous talking points. They foment anarchy and violence against the President of the United States and should be exposed as the deceitful puppets they are. James Comey had already testified before Congress and made it crystal clear that President Trump never directed him to stop the investigation into the Russians – there was no wrongdoing and no basis for any case against Trump for obstruction of justice. Yet, plagiarist Fareed Zakaria pursued the matter and invited Elizabeth Foley of Florida International University and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School to discuss pursuing President Donald Trump with charges of obstruction of justice.

Tribe tried to argue that there are “bigger” issues at play and talked about “abuse of power.” Tribe’s statement is typical of the left-wing liberal narrative that turns any specific debate into a scripted general diatribe against Donald Trump in an attempt to delegitimize and discredit Trump’s presidency. Our jurisprudence system in the United States was designed to be blind – it deliberately concerned itself with the WHAT of behavior not the WHO. This is an essential distinction because the Democrats under Barack Obama have turned our jurisprudence system upside down and ripped the blindfold off Lady Justice. The Democrats’ obsession with destroying Donald Trump has eradicated any semblance of fairness and transformed the left-wing liberal Democratic Party into an end-justifies-the-means movement of hypocrites determined to ignore the actual crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and focus on imagined crimes to discredit President Donald Trump.

The only Russian connection worth pursuing is Hillary Clinton’s mendacious sale of 20% of our American uranium to Russia disguised as a legitimate sale to Canada. The Canadians, who made staggering donations to the Clinton Foundation, sold their company to the Russians who now own 20% of our uranium and control much of the world’s uranium – a necessary ingredient for nuclear bombs. Hillary Clinton’s secret relationship with Russia continues to threaten our national security. That is the real Russian connection – not some fictitious concocted story about Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton has honed lying to an art form. The bogus “Benghazi video”that never existed was a lie created to protect the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama. Four Americans were killed but that is of little consequence to crooked Hillary.

The cable television news channel ratings for the week of Monday through Friday June 5-9, 2017 are in and the news continues to be bad for the ailing Fox News Channel. According to TVNewser, which is part of adweek.com:

Rachel Maddow [on MSNBC] had the No. 1 show of the night [Friday June 9], and MSNBC won the week in Monday – Friday prime time among adults 25-54. Fox News remains on top of cable news in total viewers.

This is terrible news for the Fox News Channel which gradually started to lose its commanding 15 year long ratings lead after the firing of its most popular prime time host Bill O’Reilly on April 19. The post-O’Reilly schedule change at FNC – which moved the program The Five from 5 to 9 PM ET and Tucker Carlson from 9 to 8 PM – is proving to be a disaster, especially in the 9 o’clock hour as The Five is continuing to lose ground against the competition as time goes on.

On Friday, June 9, for example, Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC at 9 PM, bested The Five in the all-important 25-54 age group demographic by almost two to one: 647,000 to 370,000 viewers. In total viewers for that hour, Maddow and MSNBC also beat Fox News: 2,620,000 to 2,307,000 viewers. In past years, FNC wiped the floor with MSNBC in total viewers in almost every prime time hour because FNC’s viewers are on average a decade older than MSNBC’s, and older viewers, tending to be more conservative, have overwhelmingly gravitated to Fox News in the past.

That seems to be no longer the case. Overall, more people are tuning into cable news these days – presumably motivated by the unceasing attacks on the Trump Administration by MSNBC and CNN. This unmistakable wave of anti-Trump viewers is pumping up the numbers for MSNBC and, to an extent, CNN, both of which have emerged as frontline leaders in the “resist” Trump movement. Most likely, the ratings collapse of Fox News is accountable to both new anti-Trump viewers flocking to MSNBC and CNN while long time Fox News viewers, fed up with FNC’s obvious shift to the left, increasingly abandon the channel, either to seek other options for conservative news or to tune out altogether.

Last weekend’s cable news ratings will be available late Tuesday afternoon, and it will be interesting to see which of the three news channels triumphed on Saturday and Sunday, particularly with the second installment of Steve Hilton’s new weekly Fox News program on Sundays at 9 PM, The Next Revolution.