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Climate and the New York Times The newspaper is hoping to persuade readers to burn more carbon.By James Freeman

Much has been written lately about the intolerance of New York Times readers toward anyone who does not share their belief that emissions of carbon dioxide will destroy the planet. But this week the newspaper gave its readers cause to wonder whether even the Times shares this belief.

At least on the surface, the Manhattan-based news organization is keeping the faith. The various items in Friday’s editions amount to a collective primal scream against President Donald Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate accord. As of this writing, the home page of the paper’s website features stories claiming that Mr. Trump’s decision was “stupid and reckless” as well as “disgraceful” and based on “dubious data” from “distorted reports.” A news report says that Mr. Trump made a political “calculation” to ignore the popular will and instead placate his base. Meanwhile a Times column carries the subtle headline, “Donald Trump Poisons the World.”

But the Times seems to have made its own calculation about the risks of environmental catastrophe. And the only reasonable conclusion is that folks at the Times don’t think burning carbon is quite as dangerous as you might think from reading their product.

Even as the newspaper warns about impending doom if Americans don’t limit their emissions, the Times has also been trying to persuade its readers to dramatically increase theirs. In print and online this week, the Times has proudly presented advertisements for an exciting product offering called, “Around the World by Private Jet: Cultures in Transformation.” It sounds delightful, assuming you like the company:

Fly around the world in a customized Boeing 757 jet for the ultimate in luxury travel. Spend 26 days visiting such places as Israel, Cuba, Colombia, Australia, Myanmar and Iceland. Four award-winning New York Times journalists will accompany you, each for several days as you visit areas where they have expertise.

The Times promises, “In the air, your private jet comes with lie-flat beds and a dedicated cabin crew and chef.” Most Americans, who are generally not as well-heeled as the Times’ target demographic, probably couldn’t leave carbon footprints this big if they tried. And it wouldn’t be easy for the Times to design a less efficient means of circling our beloved planet. This week the print version of the advertisement noted there would be just 50 travelers—on an aircraft that can carry more than 200.

The concept of this trip doesn’t seem to square with the message being conveyed in the newspaper’s news and opinion pages, to say the least. Could it be a rogue operation from some overly aggressive and less environmentally sensitive staff in the Times marketing department? That seems unlikely, because at least according to the online description of this fabulous adventure, one of the “experts” on this journey is none other than New York Times Company Chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. CONTINUE AT SITE

At the New York Times, a Public Execution The paper fires its public editor for resisting the Resistance. By Kyle Smith

‘Democracy dies in darkness,” declares the Washington Post, in a line that Dean Baquet, editor of the rival New York Times said, not inaccurately, “sounds like the next Batman movie.” Now the Times has joined the WaPo in dumping its designated internal soul-searcher (dubbed the “public editor” at the New York paper, “ombudsman” at the Washington one). So a more fitting DC Comics–style motto for both papers would be “Who will watch the Watchmen?”

That line (from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, with a nod to Juvenal) became painfully relevant to the Times’ exceptionally conscientious public editor, Liz Spayd, when she was fired and her position eliminated this week. Spayd served less than a year of her announced two-year term. News broke only on May 31 that her last day on the job would be two days after that, and the office of public editor would be replaced with a “reader center.” Read the comments beneath a Paul Krugman column sometime and you’ll gain some sense of what that might be like.

Why so hasty, premature, and unceremonious a sacking? Spayd, who said upon her appointment last summer that “I’m not here to make friends,” was apparently a little too good at not making them. A peeved Baquet called one of her efforts a “bad column” and “fairly ridiculous.”

Worse, Spayd was morally on the same team as lynch mobs, according to Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress in his piece “The dark history of how false balance journalism enabled lynching.” This was a slippery-slope argument in response to Spayd’s having said that journalists shouldn’t “apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidate.” Millhiser believed that the many felonies committed by Hillary Clinton in the course of shielding her e-mail from public scrutiny and removing classified information from secure channels was a non-story and that the Times should shut up about it.

The Atlantic attacked Spayd by approvingly quoting bloggers who wrote that Spayd, a 25-year veteran of the Washington Post who rose to the position of managing editor of that paper before editing the Columbia Journalism Review and then moving on to the Times, is “inclined to write what she doesn’t know” and that her work has become “iconic in its uselessness and self-parody.” Slate accused her of “squandering the most important watchdog job in journalism” by being too solicitous of the readers, notably when she wrote a column under the “smug” headline “Want to attract more readers? Try listening to them” and when she “sympathized with readers’ chauvinistic gripes about the Times’ sports page.” (The “chauvinists” quoted by Spayd were saying things like “Why are there big stories on Nordic surfing, German ice water swimming and Brazilian badminton and hardly any beat coverage of the Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Devils or Islanders?” The sports editor replied, in Spayd’s paraphrase, that “routine game coverage is not a priority.” Did I mention that the public-editor column was the second-funniest part of the resolutely humorless paper, after the corrections column?)

After Spayd told Tucker Carlson that some tweets by professionally neutral Times news reporters that displayed open contempt for and hostility to Donald Trump were “outrageous” and “over the line” and should face “some kind of consequence,” the blue-checkmark battalions rose up to denounce Spayd, calling her “the worst possible public editor for the Trump era” and “a disgrace,” adding that the Times had “embarrassed itself” by hiring her.

Spayd did her best to be even-handed in the eleven months she held the job. The angry Left could not forgive this.

Are Democrats and the Establishment Media Doing Russia’s Job by Creating Chaos? By Michael van der Galien

Conservative website The Daily Caller has published a thorough analysis of the Washington Post’s report accusing Jared Kushner of requesting a secret, secure line of communication with Russia so the incoming Trump administration could talk to the Russians without any interference from the Obama administration. It’s worth your time to read it completely, but here are some key quotes:

WaPo also claimed American intelligence agencies discovered the ploy through an intercepted open phone call by Kislyak to Moscow. Observers have noted that Kislyak, a seasoned spy, made the phone call on an “open line,” and therefore knew it was likely to be intercepted.

[…]

To date, there has been no independent verification the letter is real or that WaPo’s description of its contents is accurate. The Washington Post editors also never explain why they withheld the letter.

Why would they withhold it? Sure, there may be reasons to do so in order to protect a source, but if the letter is anonymous, that’s not a possible excuse. In any case, on we go:

The story is weakened further since its reporters only cite unnamed government officials to confirm the anonymous letter’s charges.

[…]

“I don’t know who leaked this information, but just think about it this way — you’ve got the ambassador of Russia reporting back to Moscow on an open channel, ‘Hey, Jared Kushner’s going to move into the embassy,’” Graham said on CNN.

Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told TheDCNF other unreleased parts of the letter could undermine the credibility of the author and discredit the allegations about Kushner.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan government watchdog group dedicated to openness and transparency, said he thought there could be references that show the letter’s author had a partisan agenda, which WaPo reporters wanted to hide.

Hillary Clinton is Delusional, Hateful and Insane Daniel Greenfield

New York Magazine’s love letter to Hillary is an embarrassment even to an already biased media. Its thesis is that Hillary Clinton is a victim of sexism. It’s littered with absurd photos of a Hillary in yellow striding around campaign headquarters stiffly sorting through mail from her fans. And it gives Hillary a forum to be as delusional as she wants.

But this was an election that was, in many ways, about anger. And Trump and Sanders capitalized on that.

“Yes.” Clinton nods. “And I beat both of them.”

Okay then.

She argues, “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.”

All that voter suppression in a state she chose not to campaign in. A state that Bernie Sanders also won. A state with a 6.3% black population. But let’s not forget the FBI and the Russians who prevented black people in Wisconsin from voting.

When I ask Clinton about the eagerness to blame her and her alone for the election result, she gets impatient. “Oh, I don’t know, you’d have to talk to a psychologist about it. There’s always, what’s that word … Schadenfreude — ‘cut her down to size,’ ‘too big for her own britches’ — I get all that. But I don’t see this being done to other people who run, particularly men. So I’m not going to engage in it. I take responsibility, I admit that I’m not a perfect candidate — and don’t know anybody who was — but at the end of the day we did a lot of things right and we weathered enormous headwinds and we were on our way to winning. So that is never going to satisfy my detractors. And you know, that’s their problem.”

Yes, you would have to talk to a psychologist to understand why Hillary and New York Magazine assume a candidate shouldn’t take the full blame for an election defeat. It’s clearly sexism.

Having been on the receiving end of the right’s anger for decades, Clinton knows from relentless hate. They still chant “Lock her up” at Trump rallies, just as they did at the New York Stock Exchange as she gave her concession speech. “You know, these guys on the other side are not just interested in my losing, they want to keep coming after me. I mean, think about that for a minute. What are they so afraid of? Me, to some extent. Because I don’t die, despite their best efforts. But what [really drives them] is what I represent.”

Maybe it’s because Hillary Clinton committed a series of crimes. But maybe she has a point. It’s what she represents.

Washington Post’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief Peddles Anti-Israel Fake News Dishonesty and distortion on Israeli security check points. Ari Lieberman

I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to anti-Israel reporting in the so-called mainstream media, the New York Times consistently takes top prize. Its writers have attempted to mainstream hate sites, romanticized rock throwing and have openly stated that they could not be impartial when writing about those pesky Jews. Given its current radical trajectory it’s safe to say that NYT will retain this dubious distinction for the foreseeable future. But another paper is giving the NYT a run for its money.

Led by its Jerusalem bureau chief, William Booth, the Washington Post has aggressively engaged in historical revisionism, propaganda and yellow journalism. On May 24, the paper featured an article called, “A Palestinian’s daily commute through an Israeli checkpoint.” The piece, which lacks balance as well as context, centers on a sympathetic Palestinian Arab named Taweel, and the “frustration humiliation [and] pressure” he must endure when entering Israel proper through a checkpoint called “Checkpoint 300.”

The article notes that Taweel, while working in Israel, earns double what he would earn working for a Palestinian employer. What the article fails to note is that there is a dearth of jobs in Palestinian Authority controlled areas. This is because the Palestinian economy is rife with corruption and graft. Well-paying government jobs are awarded through connections rather than competence. The same holds true for obtaining lucrative government contracts.

Private sector growth, innovation and healthy competition are virtually non-existent. The Palestinian economy, to the extent that one could call it that, is a beggar economy which has gotten used to living off the fat of the West. The PA receives billions in Western aid and much of that money gets siphoned off by government officials or those connected to them. Some of it is channeled as stipends to the families of imprisoned and dead Arab terrorists, neutralized or arrested while carrying out acts of barbarism against Israeli, American and British nationals.

By circumstances of their own making, Palestinians have been forced to seek work in Israel. To work in Israel, Taweel must enter through Checkpoint 300. Naturally, the depiction of Checkpoint 300 is unflattering to say the least. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of Palestinian laborers are pressed into cages and then must pass through turnstiles after which they must endure intrusive security checks.

But what Booth glaringly fails to note is that these checkpoints did not exist before Arafat unleashed his goons and suicide bombers on Israel’s civilian population. The security fence and most of the checkpoints were a direct outgrowth of the Oslo War, also known as the Second Intifada, which began in 2,000 and ended four years later. Booth seems to lack a rudimentary understanding of cause and effect.

Moreover, Checkpoint 300 is a crossing point between Judea & Samaria, and Israel proper. All nations have the right to screen and monitor foreign citizens who enter their territory and this is particularly true when those entering maintain visceral hatreds toward the country they’re entering. They also have the right to deny entry entirely, and Israel periodically and justifiably does this when the security situation warrants. For inexplicable reasons, Booth applies a different and impossible standard to Israel, and barely touches on Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

He also adopts Palestinian propaganda talking points, referring to Israel’s security fence as either a “barrier wall” or “separation barrier.” In fact, most of the so-called “barrier wall” consists of fencing. The pejorative term “separation barrier” is meant to imply the imposition of two separate systems, one for Israelis and the other for Palestinians – a subtle attempt to peddle the anti-Semitic apartheid narrative. Of course, the security fence did not exist prior to the Oslo War and concomitant deterioration of the security situation; again, cause and effect.

Booth pays scant attention to the 1967 Six-Day War and events preceding it. The history of the Six-Day War is well known and the aggressors, well established. It was not Israel who threatened to destroy the Arabs but rather vice versa. Arab anti-Semitic invective and blood-curdling shrill in the weeks preceding the war would have put the most ardent Nazi to shame.

Booth refers to Kiryat Arba, a Jewish community in Judea, as a “Jewish settlement infamous as the home to the American-born physician Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshipers with a machine gun at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994.” But he fails to note that the city of Hebron which abuts Kiryat Araba is the place where Arabs, inspired by ancient hatred, massacred 67 Jewish residents, including women and children. In fact, the 1929 Hebron massacre was so transformative and so etched in the collective psyche of Jews that at least one scholar has referred to it as “Year Zero” of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Why Booth notes one massacre without addressing the arguably more impactful other is anyone’s guess.

CNN =CERTAINLY NOT NEWS BY ROBIN DOLGYN

Newscaster Bob Schieffer unwittingly demonstrated the depths his colleagues will descend to disparage President Trump at CNN.

Schieffer broke from the standard CNN narrative to remark that the president “actually” sounded “dignified and even presidential,” during his momentous speech before more than 50 Arab and Muslim leaders delivered recently in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Schieffer had gone too far in his faint praise of the president.

“You know, Bob,” said his on-air colleague John Berman, “There will be people who look at that last comment you made and say, you’re normalizing the president.” That was just the wind-up before landing the real punch: Berman mused aloud over making laudatory remarks about the president just “because he (Trump) met this admittedly very low bar for not sounding foolish.”

This time Berman wasn’t dealing the race card, but rather pulled out the character assassination card from the bottom of the deck. After all — you wouldn’t want to “normalize” a wife beater, or serial killer. Why would you think of “normalizing” the president? Liberal hysteria is now a national condition.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Schieffer wasn’t going to be shamed into marching back his remarks on President Trump: “I’m not trying to normalize him in any way,” Schieffer replied. “I’m trying to do what reporters do — report and try to emphasize what I think is important.”

Being an old-school journalist, Schieffer may be raising the bar for his colleagues at the Trump-bashing network. Sadly, in the end, Schieffer joined his colleagues at the cable channel in both condescending rhetoric and mean-spirited tone.

“He didn’t sound like the guy at the end of the bar popping off,” Schieffer added. “You may agree or disagree with what he said but he sounded like a president. This went over very well — mainly because he stayed on script. He sounded like someone who actually thought about what he was going to say before he said it. No tweets today.” Faint praise indeed.

Schieffer never veered too far off script himself: But, just for a moment, he actually sounded like he was a newscaster “trying to do what reporters do — report.”

The Big Money Behind Fake News What really powers the media’s fake news scandal machine. Daniel Greenfield

Fake news is profitable.

The New York Times hit piece on the Comey memo earned the paper its most concurrent readers per second. Pretty good for a piece about a piece of paper that the leftist paper had never even seen and which was, supposedly, described to it by one of Comey’s associates.

But that didn’t stop it from racking up over 6 million views.

Media fake news isn’t just an agenda. It’s enormously profitable. Hit pieces powered by anonymous sources bring in over 100,000 readers in an age when live is king. For individual reporters, finding a source, real or fake, that can back up the left’s Trump conspiracy theories can put them on the map.

The Comey story comes from Michael Schmidt who made a name by supposedly finding documents relating to media claims of a “Haditha Massacre” in a Baghdad junkyard where “an attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.” It was dashing and also very convenient.

The claims didn’t hold up in court. Most of the Marine heroes who were dragged through the mud over Haditha had their cases dropped. One case dragged out and ultimately came out to very little. But the New York Times cashed in. And Schmidt did much better out of it than Cpl. Stephen Tatum.

Haditha was the Times’ discount version of Mai Lai. Now in a desperate effort to reclaim the glory days of the media left, the New York Times and the Washington Post are trying to recreate Watergate.

It’s no coincidence that many of the big vital hit pieces aimed at President Trump have come out of the Washington Post. At the end of last year, the paper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos went on a hiring spree. The goal was “quick turnaround investigative reporting”.

Washington Post editor Marty Baron explained, “We are creating a rapid response investigative team to do investigative stories more quickly, using a lot of the digital tools that are available to us now. We hugely value the longer, deeper investigations as well, but we want to supplement that with quicker investigations that can have an impact almost immediately.”

How do you do “quicker investigations”? How can you predict that an investigation will pay off rapidly? The best way to make sure that your investigation will quickly deliver a major story is to fake it.

Those quick investigative stories haven’t been coming from digital tools. They are based on anonymous sources. Real investigative reporting takes time. But a fake news story full of innuendo backed by a bunch of anonymous sources that repeat what “everyone” in the media already knows is true, is quick.

That’s what having “an impact almost immediately” means. You don’t do the hard work. You fake it.

The Washington Post has racked up viral hit fake news stories backed by anonymous sources. And it’s paying off. The Post claimed a traffic increase of 50% at the end of last year with a 75% increase in new subscribers. The official line is that Jeff Bezos has transformed the Post’s digital strategy. The reality was conveyed by its new anti-Trump slogan. “Democracy dies in darkness.” The silly slogan was an exercise in branding. It announced that this was the paper of choice for “researched” attacks on Trump.

Now the Post has hit $100 million in digital revenues and added hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. All of this is quite a change from a few years ago when the Post was losing $50 million a year and Baron was talking about shrinking the newsroom.

Shock: Complete MSM News Blackout on NSA Illegal Spying Bombshell By Debra Heine

“The legacy media’s institutional left-wing bias has always been obvious, but it’s never been quite this sickening.”

On Wednesday, investigative news site Circa News broke a blockbuster story about illegal spying during the Obama years. So far, only Fox News and a handful of conservative websites have covered the bombshell news. According to Newsbusters, the big three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — have completely omitted the story from their evening broadcasts. So have the Washington Post, the New York Times, and every other major mainstream media outlet. They’ve opted instead to cover RussiaGate fodder that continues to bear little fruit and negative news about Donald Trump.

“Trump shoved someone in Brussels today!” every mainstream media news outlet in America reported ad nauseam on Thursday.

In their report, Circa revealed that “the National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall.”

“More than one in 20 internet searches conducted by the National Security Agency, involving Americans, during the Obama administration violated constitutional privacy protections,” Fox News’ Bret Baier reported near the top of Special Report Wednesday evening. “And that practice went on for years. Not only that, but the Obama administration was harshly rebuked by the FISA court for doing it.”

Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen cut to the chase: “On the day President Obama visited Los Angeles last October to yuk it up with Jimmy Kimmel, lawyers for the National Security Agency were quietly informing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that NSA had systematically violated the rights of countless Americans.”

Via Newsbusters:

“Declassified documents, first obtained by the news site Circa, show the FISA court sharply rebuked the administration,” Rosen noted as he began to read a passage from the FISA court’s opinion. “’With greater frequency than previously disclosed to the Court, NSA analysts had used U.S. person identifiers to query the results of internet ‘upstream’ collection, even though NSA’s Section 702 minimization procedures prohibited such queries.’”

The Fox News reporter was intrigued by the documents because: “These disclosers are timely though, as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—one of the primary means by which U.S. citizens are caught up in incidental surveillance—is up for reauthorization, Bret, by the Congress at year’s end.”

John Soloman, one of the Circa reporters who broke the story, talked with Rosen and told him that “tonight, for the first time, we can say confidently that there’s been a finding that some of that espionage, that spying on Americans, actually violated the law.”

The condemning evidence seemed to have no end, as Rosen reported that:

The documents show it was back in 2011 that the FISA court first determined NSA’s procedures to be, quote, “statutorily and constitutionally deficient with respect to their protection of U.S. person information.” Five years later, two weeks before Election Day, the judges learned that NSA had never adequately enacted the changes it had promised to make. The NSA inspector general and its office of compliance for operations “have been conducting other reviews covering different time periods,” the judges noted, “with preliminary results suggesting that the problem is widespread during all periods of review.”

Rosen had also mentioned how “the judges blasted NSA’s ‘institutional ‘lack of candor’’ and added ‘This is a very serious fourth amendment issue.’” CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Sells Out NATO! Well, no, but a Trump speech triggers another overwrought uproar.

Donald Trump creates many of his own problems, but sometimes he can’t win no matter what he does. Consider the uproar on Thursday because the President supposedly did not explicitly endorse NATO’s Article 5 commitment that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.

Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and beating heart of the U.S. diplomatic establishment, followed Mr. Trump’s speech with a Twitter barrage that included: “Every US President since Truman has pledged support for Article 5—that US will defend Europe. Not so Trump today at #NATO. Major mistake.” The herd of independent media minds then stampeded with the theme that Mr. Trump had deliberately failed to commit the U.S. to defending Europe against attack.

But is that really what happened? Mr. Trump was speaking, briefly, at an event at NATO headquarters in Brussels unveiling the Article 5 and Berlin Wall Memorials. The Article 5 Memorial commemorates the only time that NATO has triggered Article 5, which came after al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. on 9/11. The Memorial includes a remnant of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Here is what Mr. Trump said in the third paragraph of his speech: “This ceremony is a day for both remembrance and resolve. We remember and mourn those nearly 3,000 innocent people who were brutally murdered by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Our NATO allies responded swiftly and decisively, invoking for the first time in its history the Article 5 collective defensive commitments.”

‘It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn.’ By Rich Lowry

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/447934/print
‘It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn.’
By Rich Lowry

The New York Times has a new blockbuster™ story this afternoon on Russian officials talking about trying to influence Trump aides, but there’s always a caveat in these kind of reports that makes them more smoke as opposed to a smoking gun. In the case of the Times piece, it is the above sentence. (And even if the Russian officials did try to influence them, that still leaves us short of collusion.)