RUTHFULLY YOURS

In losing Megyn Kelly, Fox News appears to have fallen upward to higher ratings at a lower price.

“Fox News’s Tucker Carlson is nearly doubling the ratings of his predecessor, Megyn Kelly, when compared to the same time period last year, according to Nielsen Media Research,” reports The Hill. “‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ is up 95 percent in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet most compared with the same period in 2016, when ‘The Kelly File’ occupied the 9 p.m. ET time slot. Carlson has averaged 775,000 viewers per night in the category, while Kelly averaged 398,000 during the same time period, Jan. 11–22.”

That Kelly can be so easily eclipsed is a bad omen for NBC. It is a testimony to the effectiveness of Carlson, but it also hints at the hollowness of the buzz around her. Much of that buzz derived from her status as a subversive at a conservative-leaning network, talk that will dissipate once she’s at NBC. Plus, Fox News viewers don’t appear to miss her too terribly, and there is little reason to believe they’ll follow her to NBC.

As Jack Shafer notes, stars who leave the networks that made them stars often fail away from them: “One lesson [Barbara] Walters and [Katie] Couric — and the other high-profile network defectors (Harry Reasoner, Diane Sawyer, Roger Mudd, et al.) — teach is of the non-transferability of TV star power. TV stars struggle to survive outside of the context in which they were nurtured. The current network anchors — Scott Pelley, David Muir and Lester Holt — all benefited from the fact that they ripened their talents at their respective networks before they got their evening chairs. Viewers grew accustomed to their faces and their styles.”

Kelly’s decision to leave was supposed to weaken Fox News and bolster its competitors. But so far it appears to have saved Rupert Murdoch a ton of money (he was offering her a reported $100 million to stay) while eliminating a growing problem: a star, more popular with chattering-class pundits than conservative viewers, who was increasingly showboating at the expense of the network.

According to Shafer, “Television talent raids — like the one NBC News chairman Andrew Lack has just pulled off — are almost never a simple matter of improving your own roster. As the history of broadcasting shows us, a single major defection by a popular anchor rarely improves that acquiring network’s ratings or public appeal. The primary aim of such larceny: Weaken your TV opponent’s line-up by making off with one of their visible stars. Anything else accomplished is just gravy.”

By that standard, NBC has already failed. In switching from Kelly to Carlson, Fox has gained a new star and freed itself from an overrated one.

Last week the media lost its mind over reports that press briefings might be moved from the White House back to the Eisenhower Office Building next door where President Eisenhower held the first ever televised press conference.

Media outlets issued panicked reports of being “evicted,” “kicked out” or “exiled” from the cramped theater that used to be the White House’s indoor swimming pool. There was outrage at the thought that they might have to take an equally short walk to the White House Conference Center where they had already worked while the Bush White House spent millions in taxpayer money renovating the room.

“The press went crazy, so I said, ‘Let’s not move it.'” President Trump finally reassured them.

He got as much gratitude for it as President Nixon did for ruining a perfectly good indoor pool and as President Bush did for spending a fortune renovating it. Instead the media began spreading the same conspiracy theories accusing Bush of plotting to permanently banish them from the White House.

And that’s exactly what President Trump should do.

“There’s no way the people are being served if they kick the people’s representatives out of the People’s House,” Ron Fournier absurdly postured.

The people elected President Donald J. Trump. Nobody elected Ron Fournier. The National Journal he works for, like most of the Atlantic media properties, specializes in inside baseball for insiders.

Trust ratings and approval levels for the media are so far down in the toilet that it would take a plumber to find them. If the media are the people’s representatives, then the people want to elect different ones. Those are some of the same representatives that the media is trying to ban from social media with a fake “Fake News Crusade” and by resisting any expansion of press briefings with threats and warnings.

“We’ll have to consider doing things other than protesting and whining,” Fournier threatened. “We’ll have to think about what we can do to bring some pain to make our point.”

Do what?

Run items accusing President Trump of being a traitor, a liar, a racist, a rapist and a Batman villain? The media has already done all of those. What else is it going to except shout more lies even louder?

If Obama had delivered Donald Trump’s inaugural address it would have been hailed for its eloquence, nobility and resolve. But it was not merely a Republican at the lectern, it was a maverick Republican, so the consensus insists the entire known world is in mortal peril.
I noticed yet again that the Democrats in the US have a way with the instantaneous dissemination of words; or, at least, when it comes to the “dark” word. President Trump had hardly finished his inaugural address when it was in the mouths of CNN commentators and, tout de suite, I saw it appear via the ABC and The Australian. I guess it also made an appearance in other media outlets. It was previously used, I recall, in describing President Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. And then too it spread like wildfire among the media elite.

“We the citizens of America are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people…We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.”

This doesn’t sound too dark to me. So where is the darkness so perceptibly spotted by the Dems at their ‘media control headquarters’? Here it is, just 83 words taken out of his whole speech.

“But for many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful children deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

If you can stand it, picture the well-heeled media types on CNN twittering on about how this sat uneasily with the soaring [empty] inauguration speeches of yesteryear. For example: “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to make your farms flourish and let clean water flow.” And the progress President Obama made on this? Tut-tut, a mere detail.

Never mind that people and whole communities are being thrown on the scrap heap as a result of globalisation, high corporate taxes and mindless regulations; never mind that the living standards of the low skilled are being forced down by illegal immigration; never mind that law abiding people and their children are living in fear in crime-ridden inner cities. There is nothing to see there. After all, east-coast commentators on CNN are doing OK – thanks very much.

Talk about living in a bubble. It is sickening and is precisely why, and not before time, that America has President Trump. And look the way he immediately followed up his supposedly gloom-laden remarks: “We are one nation and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams. And their success will be our success.” The group-thinking MSM would have wet their pants in admiration for his soaring oratory if Obama had said it. The difference is that Trump said it. And the palpable fear is that he actually means it and just might succeed in doing something about it. Forget this cant that he is our president and we want him to succeed. They want him to fail monumentally.

As the nation prepares for the peaceful transfer of power on Inauguration Day, CNN is dreaming up scenarios whereby the Obama administration can keep power if President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence were blown up as they prepared to take to oath of office.
On the Wednesday, January 18 broadcast of CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer aired a segment with a chyron featuring the headline “Developing Now.” During that “developing” segment, Blitzer and correspondent Brian Todd discussed what would happen if the unthinkable occurred on January 20.
Blitzer introduced the segment, saying, “What if an incoming president and his immediate successors were wiped out on day one?” and from there, CNN contributor Brian Todd took over to outline the line of succession if an attack blew up the inaugural dais, killing both Trump and Pence.
The upshot was that in the case of both heads of state being killed, the Secretary of State would take over. Currently that man is Secretary of State John Kerry, But in case some objected because his office would also end as of noon on Inauguration Day, then it would be the Speaker of the House — Republican Paul Ryan — or even Obama’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs Tom Shannon.
The report also noted that the designated survivor appointed by the Obama administration could also become president in the case of a disaster. So, in CNN’s analysis, most of the people who would take over in the worst-case scenario would keep the Obama administration in power, at least indirectly.

Journalists from The Huffington Post, Slate and Univision will gather days before Donald Trump’s inauguration to publicly discuss “how the news media can and should proceed to cover” the president-elect.

Slate will host the event next Wednesday, called “Not the New Normal.” CNN’s Brian Stelter will moderate the panel at New York University.

The focus of the discussion will include “how journalists and media companies at large can play a bigger role in making sure that fact prevails over fiction in the coming months and years,” according to Slate.

Slate’s editor-in-chief, Julia Turner, and Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg — who hosts “Trumpcast,” a podcast dedicated to covering the president-elect — will participate in the panel.

Joining them will be Borja Echevarría, Univision Digital’s vice president and editor-in-chief; Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen; and New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Most of the panelists were staunchly critical of Trump during the campaign and have remained so since Election Day.

Tickets will cost $30, with proceeds benefiting the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This is the first time Slate has hosted a panel to discuss how to cover an incoming president.

Washington and the press corps are feuding over the Trump “dossier,” screaming about what counts as “fake news.” The pity is that this has turned into a story about media ethics. The far better subject is the origin of the dossier itself.

“Fake news” doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created by people with an agenda. This dossier—which alleges that Donald Trump has deep backing from Russia—is a turbocharged example of the smear strategy that the left has been ramping up for a decade. Team Trump needs to put the scandal in that context so that it can get to governing and better defuse the next such attack.

The more that progressives have failed to win political arguments, the more they have turned to underhanded tactics to shut down their political opponents. (For a complete account of these abuses, see my book, “The Intimidation Game.”) Liberals co-opted the IRS to crack down on Tea Party groups. They used state prosecutors to launch phony investigations. They coordinated liberal shock troops to threaten corporations. And they—important for today’s hysteria—routinely employed outside dirt diggers to engage in character assassination.

This editorial page ran a series in 2012 about one such attack, on Frank VanderSloot. In 2011 the Idaho businessman gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. The following spring, the Obama re-election campaign publicly smeared Mr. VanderSloot (and seven other Romney donors) as “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.”

This national shaming, by the president no less, painted a giant target on Mr. VanderSloot’s back. The liberal media slandered him daily on TV and in print. The federal bureaucracy went after him: He was ultimately audited by the IRS and the Labor Department. About a week after the Obama attack, an investigator contacted a courthouse in Idaho Falls demanding documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as any other litigation involving him. We traced this investigator to an opposition-research chop shop called Fusion GPS.

Fusion is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson. When we asked how he could justify dumpster-diving into the divorce records of private citizens, he said only that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target. He refused to tell us who’d paid him to do this slumming, and federal records didn’t show any payments to Fusion from prominent Democratic groups or campaigns. The money may well have been washed through third-party groups.

Why does this matter? Guess who is behind that dossier against Mr. Trump: Fusion GPS. A Republican donor who opposed Mr. Trump during the primaries hired Fusion to create a file on “the real estate magnate’s past scandals and weaknesses,” according to the New York Times. After Mr. Trump won the GOP race, that donor pulled the plug. Fusion then seamlessly made its product available to “new clients”—liberals supporting Hillary Clinton. Moreover, it stooped to lower tactics, hiring a former British spook to help tie Mr. Trump to the Russians. (Fusion GPS did not respond to a request for comment.)

No media organization has so far been able to confirm a single allegation in the dossier. Given Fusion’s history and tactics, trying arguably isn’t worth the effort. Truth was never its purpose.

The point of the dossier—as with the dredging into Mr. VanderSloot’s personal life, or the smearing of the Koch brothers, or Harry Reid’s false accusation that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes—was to gin up the ugliest, most scurrilous claims, and then trust the click-hungry media to disseminate them. No matter how false the allegations, the subject of the attack is required to respond, wasting precious time and losing credibility. Mr. Trump should be focused on his nominations, his policies, disentangling himself from his business. Instead his team is trying to disprove a negative and prevent the accusations, no matter how flimsy, from seeping into voters’ minds. CONTINUE AT SITE

If you believe the Age, SMH and our national broadcaster, FBI Director James Comey is in a whole lot of trouble for nobbling Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. Actually, the cited document suggests it is the failed candidate and her cronies who are in the hottest water.
The business of journalism is actually pretty simple — or should be — especially when it comes to re-writing press releases. Your garden-variety hack reads the hand-out from a company, government agency, PR outfit or whatever, re-writes it and submits the copy to an editor who casts an eye over the offering and, allowing that there is nothing glaringly stupid about it, places the reporter’s effort in the paper or, these days, on the news organisation’s website. If there is a problem, an eye-smacking incongruity or doubts about the veracity of the source, checks are instituted and corrections made. That’s the theory, anyway.

Idiots could do it, one would think. But that expectation, alas, is beyond the wit and means of the click-baiters at the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC, all of which today (January 13) published a Reuters report that asserted, as the Fairfax headline put it, “FBI, [sic] director James Comey’s actions during US election to be probed“.

The shame of this story is that it is no better than 10% correct. Its original sin is the confirmation bias of the editors who chose to run it as is.

First, the headline’s errant comma suggests grammatical incompetence, once regarded as a damnable journalistic vice, but difficulty with the language is the most petty of the account’s flaws. Of much greater concern is that the Reuters wire copy is not merely wrong but reekingly so by virtue of its misrepresentation by omission. A competent foreign-desk editor, one who keeps abreast of his or her assigned beat, would have spiked it at a glance. Actually, make that “editors”, because the national broadcaster is no better and quite possibly more culpable, as its story is longer but every bit as guilty of distortion by what is left out.

The press release from the US Department of Justice’s watchdog Office of the Inspector General can be found here. A Google search require precisely .75 of a second to locate it. Below, interspersed with explanations, are reproductions of its key points.