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MEDIA

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WaPo Op-Ed: ISIS Fighters Are Human Beings Too Just human beings who behead captives, burn children alive, and enslave women. Mark Tapson

By on February 9th, 2016

Last Friday a Washington Post contributor penned an op-ed with the provocative title, “ISIS kidnapped my best friend. But when I met its fighters, I couldn’t hate them.” The op-ed seems intended to convey a poignant, emotional insight about the tragic human cost to everyone trapped in the hell that is ISIS-controlled territory. But the end result is moral equivalence.

Photojournalist Sebastian Meyer relates that his best friend was kidnapped in 2014 by ISIS militants. Meyer can’t say much more than that, he claims, without further endangering his friend, who presumably then is still being held captive somewhere even after all this time. Given the opportunity months later to question an ISIS captive, Meyer – eager to get some answers and some catharsis – was surprised to find himself becoming sympathetic to the fighter for having been recruited into service with the Islamic terror group at what we in the West would consider the tender age of 13.

Meyer detailed the captive fighter’s background:

Ali was born in 1995 and joined the Islamic State in 2008, at the age of 13, he told me. He was trained as an assassin and given his first mission two years later. He and three friends were sent to kill four Iraqi police officers in Mosul. The group tracked the men down, executed them with shots to the back of their heads and buried them where they fell. Ali said he had killed eight or nine men in battle, not including the five he’d beheaded.

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The Cure for Media Bias Breaking the monopoly of the progressive gospel. Bruce Thornton

By on February 3rd, 2016

We have long known that the progressive media no longer have any journalistic integrity. The pass given to Barack Obama on his gaffes, sketchy personal history, and dubious associates––all of which would have sunk a Republican candidate––stripped the last camouflage from reporters who used to at least try to hide their political biases and prejudices. Now facing the end of their messiah’s presidency, the media left are pulling out all the stops to elevate Hillary Clinton and demonize her opposition in order to complete The One’s fundamental transformation of the United States.

But candidate Obama, whose dubious personal biography the media helped to keep on the down low, lacked much of a public record, making him something of a blank slate to be filled with pleasing rhetoric and a feel-good bio. Hillary, on the other hand, has a long public history of money-grubbing, lying, and abusing power. We all know the catalogue of Hillary scandals, from Whitewater to Benghazi, from Filegate to Emailgate, from lying to the grieving parents of the dead heroes of Benghazi, to lying to the American people about the classified information that passed through her unsecured private server. Despite their eagerness to cover Bill’s sexual scandals in the 90s, today’s mainstream media have ignored, downplayed, or rationalized most of Hillary’s bad behavior. And during this primary season, they have not objectively followed the most blatant scandals––Benghazi, the unsecured email server, and the fiscal skullduggery of the Clinton Foundation–– with the obsessive fervor they’ve devoted to Donald Trump’s bad manners, Carly Fiorina’s alleged failures at Hewlett-Packard, Dr. Ben Carson’s missing surgical sponges, Ted Cruz’s “meanness,” or Marco Rubio’s traffic violations.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the New York Times endorsed Hillary on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Having helped put an incompetent and malignant token black in the White House, the Times is now eager to install a token woman, no matter how lacking in skill and achievements. But still astonishing is the editors’ claim that Hillary is “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.” Such preposterous praise recalls the presidential historian who claimed that Obama is the most intelligent candidate for president ever––the same genius who thinks there is an “intercontinental railroad” and an “Austrian language.” As I’ve learned during 40 years of observing affirmative action in the university, when progressives are serving the gods of diversity and leftist ideology, reality doesn’t matter, and hectoring claims of achievement substitute for the real thing. Like a poem, the diversity “mascot,” as Thomas Sowell puts it, doesn’t have to do anything but exist.

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Media Elites Slam Charlie Hebdo for Mocking the Marginalized — Then Do the Same Themselves By Brendan O’Neill —

By on January 28th, 2016

One year after the slaughter of its staff, Charlie Hebdo still stands accused of committing what liberals have decreed to be the worst crime in comedy: “punching down.” Satire is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, chants every Charlie-phobic cartoonist, novelist, and hack, seemingly having confused drawing vulgar pictures for a living with being a Pope Francis–style warrior against injustice. The problem with Charlie Hebdo, they say, is that it mauls the marginalized — it obsessively pokes fun at Muslims. In a shameless act of victim-blaming and back-stabbing, Doonesbury drawer Garry Trudeau wrote in The Atlantic magazine, in April 2015, that the scabrous French mag committed “the abuse of satire” and was always “punching downward.”

It’s time to put this myth of punching down to bed. For two reasons. First: If Charlie Hebdo does sometimes punch down, then it’s far from alone. Many of the American and European liberals who clutch their pearls over Charlie’s mocking of Mohammed frequently engage in a punching-down of their own, ridiculing what they view as the Neanderthal white trash who lurk in the dark heart of America or in run-down bits of Europe. And second: It simply isn’t true that Charlie’s assault on Islam (the thing it’s most famous for) is “punching down.” In fact, its ridicule of Mohammed is a clear case of punching up — up against Europe’s vast system of censorship that seeks to strangle “hate speech” against belief systems.

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Understanding media terminology for events in Israel :Edgar Davidson

By on January 24th, 2016

http://edgar1981.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/understanding-media-terminology-for.html?m=1 Thanks to  William Narvey

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First Do No Harm By Marilyn Penn

By on January 22nd, 2016

The premier rule governing those who practice medicine is apparently not applicable to reporters for the New York Times. Sharon Otterman has the byline for an article detailing the arrest of David H. Newman, distinguished Mt. Sinai physician and author, on charges of sexually abusing two patients in the emergency room at different times.(”Colleagues Express Disbelief Over Arrest of Doctor with Picture-Perfect Life,” NYT 1/21) The reporter goes on to give the dates and circumstances of each patient’s story, one having occurred on Jan 12 and one elicited by a patient after hearing news of that event; her experience occurred the previous Sept. The Times article differs from all other coverage of this story in that Ms. Otterman felt it necessary to mention the full name of Dr. Newman’s wife, a practicing physician herself. She also felt the need to describe the house where the two live with their children as well as the town where it is located.

Needless to say, Dr. Newman has not been tried or convicted yet so we are not reading about a man guilty of the crime for which he has been arrested. We are possibly reading about an innocent man, wrongfully accused by a woman under the influence of morphine. The names of the two purported victims are withheld out of respect for their privacy. Why isn’t Dr. Newman’s wife afforded equal respect, both by Sharon Otterman and the Times editor who reviewed her article before publication?

In googling Ms. Otterman to gain some insight into what sort of reporter reveals irrelevant information including details of the wedding pictures of the accused, I found her own wedding announcement with the names of her bridegroom and parents. I won’t reveal them but will say that someone with the same name as Ms. Otterman’s mother has a pornographic website online. Yes, that’s irrelevant too.

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Peggy Noonan and the left’s prom dress By Richard F. Miniter ****

By on January 3rd, 2016

Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s, once said that if his competition was drowning, “he’d stick a hose in his mouth.” A very American attitude toward life and winning, which hasn’t taken root in today’s Republican establishment standard-bearers. Odd, since it was Reagan who famously said, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War. We win. They lose” – or, more germane to the politics of 2016, quipped that he was reluctant to allow a government shutdown until one day he asked himself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

But almost as if Reagan never lived, the sad fact is that you almost always find Republican establishment types today parading around in the 1950s prom dress liberals hand them to wear – a mentality they’re encouraged in by conservative establishment pundits like Charles Krauthammer, or most particularly Peggy Noonan, when, in “A Rash Leader in a Grave Time” (12/18/15), knocking Trump, she says this:

[O]ne thing an effective leader must always do is know what can be misunderstood and guard against it, what can be misconstrued and used to paint you – and your followers – as bigoted. Leaders try hard not to let that happen. It is the due diligence of politics.

Whew! Coming from Ms. Noonan, I suppose this is the gold standard of establishment thinking. But what a way in which to define leadership or diligence. I remember Ms. Noonan sideswiping Sarah Palin (during McCain’s campaign?) with the comment that we need leaders who can think through problems. Reading this mush, you’re forced to ask – what manner of thinking through does it take to conclude that effective leadership requires one not to say that which can be “misconstrued and used to paint you—and your followers—as bigoted”? News flash: Democrats always misconstrue and paint Republicans as bigoted. It’s what they do, the fetid air they thrive on. Indeed, there’s nothing Republicans can say, ever, that Democrats won’t misconstrue or lie about. Pretending there is just means you allow the left to control the debate.

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The American Papers that Praised Hitler

By on December 26th, 2015

They fell hard for the job-creating Führer with eyes that were like ‘blue larkspur.’ Why did so many journalists spend years dismissing the evidence of his atrocities?
“The train arrived punctually,” a Christian Science Monitor report from Germany informed its readers, not long after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. “Traffic was well regulated” in the new Germany, and policemen in “smart blue uniforms” kept order, the correspondent noted. “I have so far found quietness, order, and civility”; there was “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.”

As for all those “harrowing stories” of Jews being mistreated—they seemed to apply “only to a small proportion”; most were “not in any way molested.” Overall, the Monitor’s dispatch declared, the Hitler regime was providing “a dark land a clear light of hope.”
Why did many mainstream American newspapers portray the Hitler regime positively, especially in its early months? How could they publish warm human-interest stories about a brutal dictator? Why did they excuse or rationalize Nazi anti-Semitism? These are questions that should haunt the conscience of U.S. journalism to this day.

Some of the U.S. press coverage of Hitler’s first weeks in power was rooted in unfamiliarity with the man and his movement. The Nazis had risen from barely 18 percent of the national vote in mid-1930 to become Germany’s largest party only two years later, and gained power just months after that. Knowing little about Hitler and Nazism, many American editors and reporters assumed, based on previous experience, that a radical candidate would show some restraint once in office.

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Leftist Media Ignore Islamic Terrorist Groups Where is the reporting on Iran’s Islamic terrorist groups that are as monstrous as ISIS? Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

By on December 22nd, 2015

It is intriguing that mainstream media has focused on violent terrorist acts of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), a radical Sunni Islamist group, while they are deliberately avoiding raising awareness about other Islamist terrorist groups that are as brutal as ISIS, if not worse.

The other groups that I am referring to are primarily the Iranian-backed radical Islamist militias.

Brutal terrorist groups such as Kataib al-Imam Ali (KIA) are not any less violent than ISIS when it comes to the aggressive and horrific tactics they use against civilians. In fact, they are known for showing videos of cut-off heads and bodies burned over open fires. This particular group, which is backed by Iran, originated from the Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Shebl al-Zaidi is the secretary-general of Kataib al-Imam Ali and he is known for his sectarian and vicious tactics.

Another militia group that is known locally for its violent attacks is Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. It reportedly receives approximately $2 million a month from the Islamic Republic.

There exist more than 100 of these Islamist terrorist groups and they are increasing on a daily basis as they branch out.

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Biggest Liar of 2015: The Washington Post and Its Pinocchios By Colin Flaherty

By on December 16th, 2015

Colin Flaherty is the only two-time winner of the Washington Post’s Summer Spy Novel writing contest.

In its annual roundup of this year’s biggest lies and liars, the Washington Post forgot the largest liar of all: The writers and editors of the Washington Post.

We are of course talking about the Post’s recent decision to name the “hands up, don’t shoot’ campaign as one of its “Biggest Pinocchios of 2015.” But the collection of prevarications was curiously incomplete.

The Post reporter had no trouble identifying the biggest liars behind the other lies: Trump, Hillary, Kerry, Warren, whatever: The liars and lies were locked together.

Except for the biggest lie of all; the lie the Post left for last. The lie that took more ink, and went unchallenged by more professional skeptics than all the other lies put together. A lie that, apparently, told itself, because this was the only Pinocchio unmatched with a specific liar.

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The Media’s Delinquency & Manipulation of the Primaries By Frank Salvato

By on December 13th, 2015

We are still a little under two months away from the first Presidential Primary. If you are listening to the mainstream media, the GOP nomination is all but sewn-up and the establishment Republican apparatus has agita. What’s got the inside-the-beltway crowd so nervous and frustrated? Well, Donald Trump is up 13.1 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls that survey the sentiments of Republican voters. This, in and of itself, is a good reason to break out the Prylosec® if you are an establishment Republican operative. But the GOP rank-and-file really needs to take a step back and understand what has been done to them so that they can truly have their voices heard come election time.

This election cycle has been unofficially titled the “Election of the Outsider” and rightly so. The public sentiment regarding politicians – especially the agenda-driven professional class of politician – is on par with that of journalists and lawyers. If the Mariana Trench could be filled with all of them the collective attitude of the nation would skyrocket. But what We the People are being led to believe is an “accurate accounting” of our collective sentiment has been manipulated to a great extent. Again, as in the non-vetting of Barack Obama in the lead-up to the 2008 General Election, the mainstream media is grossly negligent in doing its job.

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