RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fox News has branded itself as “fair and balanced.” Compared to the mainstream media, Fox News has indeed provided some welcomed balance to coverage of the national news. However, Fox News has not lived up to its branding when it comes to its handling of Donald Trump. Several of its on-air personalities have expressed the kind of downright hostility to the Republican presidential nominee that one might expect to witness on leftist cable news bastions such as MSNBC.

Shepard Smith, the host of “Shepard Smith Reporting” as well as the managing editor of Fox News Channel’s Breaking News Division, is cast as a Fox News “hard news” anchor. Yet he leads the station’s biased coverage against Trump. Indeed, Shepard Smith has taken it upon himself to attach the racist label to Trump. For instance, following Hillary Clinton’s speech in August attempting to link Trump to the white nationalist alt-right movement, Smith became a part of her race baiting attack machine.

“He trades in racism, doesn’t he?” Shepard Smith asked rhetorically, referring to Trump. That is not hard news. It is an unfounded attack designed to discredit Trump falsely as a racist.

Smith’s attack on Trump is part and parcel of the news anchor’s penchant for engaging in the race-baiting game, which he has proven quite proficient in playing. Smith, for example, chastised former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal last July for saying that “all lives mattered” in response to the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge. “Governor,” Smith said to Jindal, “you know, you know that that phrase you just used is is (sic) one that’s seen by many as, as derogatory, right? I, I just wonder why it is that you use that phrase when there’s a certain segment of the population that believes it’s a real dig on ’em.”

Not long ago, Smith twisted his reporting on Trump’s recent reversal on the racially charged birther issue. Smith did not limit himself to stating Trump’s past record in continuing to push the issue even after President Obama produced his long-form birth certificate. Instead, Smith acted as if he were a Hillary Clinton surrogate in stating categorically that there was “no evidence to support the claim” that Hillary Clinton’s team had “started the theory that President Obama wasn’t born in America.” In case anybody missed his point, Smith added for emphasis, “Zero, it never happened.” Except it did happen, according to former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher. Asher claimed that top Hillary Clinton aide and confidante Sid Blumenthal had “told me in person” during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign that Obama was born in Kenya. At that time, Asher was an investigative editor and in charge of Africa coverage.

“During that meeting, Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya,” Asher said. “We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false. At the time of Mr. Blumenthal’s conversation with me, there had been a few news articles published in various outlets reporting on rumors about Obama’s birthplace. While Mr. Blumenthal offered no concrete proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, I felt that, as journalists, we had a responsibility to determine whether or not those rumors were true. They were not.”

In college, I had a buddy whose entire worldview was circumscribed by whatever happened to be in front of his face at that very moment. We would drive down the street and he’d read off the signs as we passed by them in the car. Instead of engaging in deep philosophical conversations about Camus or the Green Bay Packers, he’d rattle off phrases such as “Oooh, Arby’s,” or “Same-day Martinizing!” (We often joked that he always thought whatever direction he was facing was north.)

A recent myopic editorial by the New York Times, however, makes my friend look like Ben Franklin for his scope of knowledge. In opining about a recent document dump stemming from a previously secret “John Doe” investigation into Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and his allies, the Times peddles a wildly misleading argument completely devoid of context.

Last week, the Guardian, a British left-wing paper, released nearly 1,500 pages from the investigation into whether Walker “illegally” coordinated with third-party groups such as the Club for Growth during his 2012 recall election campaign. The Times asserts that these groups “are not allowed to work with a campaign to urge voters to vote for a candidate, because that would essentially allow donors to funnel money toward these groups to get around contribution limits that apply to campaign committees.”

Yet this assertion is flatly false. A Wisconsin state judge, two Milwaukee-based federal judges, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago have all ruled that relevant portions of Wisconsin state law are unconstitutional, which is why not a single person investigated in this aspect of the probe has ever been charged with anything.

The argument basically comes down to whether state laws apply to “issue” advocacy (ads that don’t expressly urge voting for or against a specific candidate) in the same way they apply to “express” advocacy (ads that explicitly direct the viewer to “vote for” or “vote against” a candidate).

Just hours after a young Somali immigrant stabbed nine people at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, a mid-sized town in central Minnesota, the far-Left Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article hinting that the suspect may have been inspired by “anti-Muslim tensions.” The article was later scrubbed and replaced with a new article that directly raised the question of whether the attack by Dahir Adan was motivated by previous anti-Muslim incidents in the city.

Last night I reported here at PJ Media on the stabbing attack and the reports from local St. Cloud police that the suspect, who at that time hadn’t been named, had made references to “Allah” and asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim.

Earlier today, family members named Dahir Adan, a local Somali man who came to the United States 15 years ago and was a junior at St. Cloud State University, as the attacker.

But at 2:42 p.m. today, Pat Pheifer of the Star Tribune published an article, now removed and replaced on the newspaper’s website, titled “Anti-Muslim Tension Isn’t New in St. Cloud.”

I screen captured the article before it was scrubbed and replaced.

In the opening paragraphs, Pheifer writes so ambiguously that one could easily conclude that someone motivated by anti-Muslim beliefs was responsible for the attack:

A cloud of anti-Muslim sentiment and tension has hung over St. Cloud for the past seven years, with incidents ranging from bullying Somali and other East African immigrants at St. Cloud Technical High School, to women being screamed at in grocery stores, pig intestines wrapped around the door handles of a halal grocery store, and offensive billboards and license plates.

The most physically injurious incident came Saturday evening when a man stabbed nine people at the city’s Crossroads Center before the attacker was killed inside the mall by an off-duty police officer. No one but the attacker was killed.

Authorities said the man reportedly asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim before assaulting them and referred to Allah during the attacks.

So after a recitation of previous anti-Muslim incidents, Pheifer introduces “the most physically injurious incident” — the mass stabbing at Crossroads Center. A reader could understandably think that this new incident was similar in nature to those just recounted.

And the ambiguous description of the incident might lead one to conclude that it was anti-Muslim in nature.