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The New York Times’ Orwellian Obsession with Israel By Phyllis Chesler

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-new-york-times-orwellian-obsession-with-israel/

Are things really as bad as I think they are regarding propaganda against Israel and Jews, a subject I began closely tracking in 2001?

Recently, I asked five educated pro-Israel people: “How many first-section, hardcopy articles about Israel and Judaism do you think The New York Times published in the last six months of 2022?”

They answered, “Probably around 30 or 40, maybe less.”

Shockingly, the answer is at least 127. Yes, I carefully counted them. This averages five negative articles every week in just one section. Given that Israel is the size of the state of New Jersey, the Times seems pathologically obsessed with it. Although they very occasionally publish a neutral or positive piece, at least 95% of their first section articles fixate on Israel’s alleged imperfections and falsely magnify them into “atrocities.”

These anti-Israel pieces also tend to be much longer than other articles. According to a 2012 study published in Sociology Mind, most Times articles are an average of 622 words. The Times’ 127 anti-Israel articles seem to average approximately 1,700 words each, often appear on the front page, continue on one or two inside pages and feature many photos. This past August alone, these articles totaled more than 43,000 words.

The Times also makes extensive use of its Twitter account, posting up to a hundred times a day to its 54.8 million followers. An Oct. 24 article on Hasidic schools and financial fraud garnered 3,687 likes and was retweeted 1,728 times. Also in October, the allegation that Israel was driving Palestinians to live in caves drew 6,111 likes and 3,432 retweets.

Imagine the psychological effect of being barraged with so much propaganda every day, month and year. And that’s from just one newspaper.

Moreover, the Times consistently runs headlines that are blatantly biased if not cunningly deceptive.

NPR Promotes Pornography for Kids By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/01/09/npr-promotes-pornography-for-kids-n1659974

Conservatives have been calling for the defunding of National Public Radio (NPR) for years now because of its blatant political bias, but now they have a new reason to deprive the news outlet of its federal funding.

This week, NPR published a misleading and disturbing essay by Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, a controversial graphic memoir documenting Kobabe’s journey to coming out as “nonbinary.” In addition to being “nonbinary,” Kobabe has nonsensical “preferred pronouns.”

Kobabe laments in her NPR essay that Gender Queer has become the most challenged book in public school libraries. “Several conservative politicians made book banning a major talking point of their campaigns,” she wrote. “There were so many challenges in such quick succession before the end of the year that I literally could not keep track of them all.”

Related: NPR Releases Hardcore Abortion Porn Audio to Savor on Your Morning Commute

By Kobabe’s telling, the book is challenged because of discrimination. “I was obviously already aware that queer, trans, and nonbinary narratives often receive pushback.” But this is incredibly misleading. In fact, Gender Queer is most often challenged because it contains graphic depictions of minors participating in sex acts — a detail Kobabe conveniently omits in her essay.

She was, however, questioned about the graphic nature of some of the illustrations in an interview with NPR. “Let me ask you this. Some of the criticism is about how explicit the book is. There are some graphic panels where you’re describing some of your sexual encounters. Did you consider doing less graphic versions of those scenes?” NPR’s Claire Murashima asked.

“You know, I really didn’t,” Kobabe said. “I drew as much as I felt like I needed to tell the story that I was trying to tell and get the points across that I was trying to make.”

Kobabe insists that her book could have been even more explicit. Opponents of the book say it is pornographic — and having seen screenshots of the illustrations, I can say this characterization is correct — which means it has no business in public libraries or school libraries. That NPR is promoting this book and giving a platform to the author, who is clearly a groomer, is disturbing. So, yes, NPR is promoting pornography aimed at grooming young children.

Last year, NPR also broadcasted a segment about “queer” sex education, which, among other things, denounced the “terrible lie” that STDs make one “dirty.”

It’s long overdue for NPR to lose its federal funding. Promoting pornography that targets kids should be the last straw.

The media glosses over the recession calamity America faces By John Dale Dunn

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/the_media_glosses_over_the_recession_calamity_america_faces.html

Joe Biden’s media supporters keep assuring us that things are getting better with the economy. However, Joe Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, wrote on New Year’s Day of the reality—we are in a recession.  Stop drinking the “we’re OK” Kool-Aid. 

Biden, with help from the Federal Reserve and Congress, wiped out $10 trillion in American wealth in 2022.  This is record-breaking destruction.

Steve Bannon at War Room rolled out a Financial Times chart from earlier in the week showing what an outlier 2022 was when compared to prior years.

The US should be in the right upper quadrant of the chart, but 2022 put the US in the left lower quadrant.  The 2022 situation doesn’t even factor in the effect of the 1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill. The data point on the chart reflects the value of assets in stocks and bonds, with no effort to measure other assets like real estate.  It might be worse if other economic measures are considered. 

Just the other day, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Branch, relying on multiple indicators, declared that we have a recession. This information is no surprise, but it raises questions about what’s happening at the rest of the Fed’s branches.

Democracy Under Siege? Parsing the New York Times’s obsession with alarmism Lee Siegel

https://www.city-journal.org/democracy-under-siege

The impending collapse of democracy—that’s not small beer. So imagine the alarm of New York Times subscribers when, on October 3, an essay titled “Democracy Challenged” appeared in the newspaper with the subhead, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.”

If the New York Times wishes to limit gun ownership in America, articles like this can hardly be said to help. Before leaving the house the day the article was published, I opened our front door as slowly as I could, motioned to the family to stay in place until I had peered up both ends of the street, and then instructed everyone to walk behind me as we all moved as noiselessly as possible toward the sidewalk and our several destinations. “Do what you can to save representative democracy in America!” my wife whispered to the kids as they set off for school.

I am joking, of course. The piece, written by Joseph Kahn, the paper’s new executive editor, appeared in what the Times calls “The Morning Newsletter.” Though this morning’s item concerned the country’s worst nightmare, it was only four paragraphs long. And it was hard to fathom. The subhead’s reference to the most serious “threats” to “representative government” “in decades” was perplexing, since any real threat to democracy would be deadly and single, not one among several competing threats. And there was no threat to American democracy decades ago, unless Kahn was referring to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were threats of a whole different order than what he went on to claim were the perils faced by American democracy now.

David French: Yes, The Dispatch Takes Money To Help Leftists Keep The Internet Conservatism-Free By: Jordan Boyd

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/19/david-french-yes-the-dispatch-takes-money-to-help-leftists-keep-the-internet-conservatism-free/

David French, the “principled conservative” who argued drag queen story hours in libraries are “blessings of liberty,” publicly confirmed last week that he’s personally advised Big Tech platforms on how to suppress the speech of people who disagree with leftists.

“A few years ago I was invited to an off-the-record meeting with senior executives at a major social media company,” reads the Atlantic contributor and Dispatch senior editor’s first sentence. In 2020, The Dispatch became a paid censor to help Facebook suppress conservative ideas using the pretense of “factchecking.”

As a Facebook censor, The Dispatch has helped suppress true information in the service of leftist conversation control. This has included keeping accurate pro-life ads off Facebook in a way that protected the candidacy of Joe Biden and restricted nonviolent political speech. Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes also defended Facebook’s 2020 election interference in the form of throttling a true story about Hunter Biden’s corruption that may financially benefit his father.

Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program in 2016. By 2020, more than 50 publications including French’s The Dispatch agreed to do Big Tech’s dirty censorship work. Throttlers like The Dispatch are tasked by Facebook “reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users.”

The Dispatch claims to be a center-right media organization. It called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, a position opposed by the vast majority of Republican voters.

Corporate Media Can Stomp And Cry All It Wants, Its Special Twitter Privileges Are Ending By: Evita Duffy-Alfonso

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/16/corporate-media-can-stomp-and-cry-all-it-wants-its-special-twitter-privileges-are-ending/

Corporate media ‘journalists’ are crying like children because they no longer get special permission to dox their political enemies.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, corporate journalists freely persecuted their political enemies by posting their identities and locations to enable in-person harassment, but not anymore. This week, Musk decided he’s no longer allowing anyone, including journalists, to jeopardize people’s safety via Twitter, and he began temporarily suspending the accounts of offending members of the press. 

“Everyone’s going to be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.

The crackdown on doxxing is personal for Twitter’s CEO. On Wednesday, Musk reported that his 2-year-old son named “X” was followed by a “crazy stalker” who had mistaken X for Musk. According to Musk, the stalker blocked the car driving his son and “climbed onto the hood.” The incident motivated Musk to suspend several high-profile journalists guilty of doxxing.

This caused the corporate media to fly into hysterics. “Elon Musk censors the press,” said one CNN headline.” “[U]nprecedented,” stated the flabbergasted Axios. “Twitter suspends journalists who wrote about owner Elon Musk,” alleged The Associated Press. “Musk has begun banning journalists who have criticized him on Twitter,” whined Washington Post TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz.

All this outrage is performative. Firstly, Musk made it clear why the journalists are suspended, and it’s not because they “criticized” him, as Lorenz said. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” wrote Musk.

What the ‘Twitter Files’ say about the future of journalism By Sarah Westwood

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/what-twitter-files-say-future-journalism

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to share internal records with a trio of independent journalists spawned stories about how Twitter executives worked to invent justifications for content decisions they’d already made on ideological grounds.

But it also feeds into a story about how Twitter itself, and other platforms, like the subscription service Substack, have decentralized the media so effectively that individual voices can drive the news in ways once reserved for legacy outlets .

Journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger each combed through reams of Twitter emails, message chains from the workplace communication tool Slack, and screenshots to publish five sets of analyses on Twitter. Their final products took the form of lengthy Twitter threads about how Twitter suppressed stories on Hunter Biden’s business dealings during the 2020 election and how the company ultimately decided to ban former President Donald Trump permanently.

The journalists all had several things in common: They all run popular Substack pages, they have all written pieces in the past for legacy media outlets like the New York Times, and they all have large Twitter followings.

The least-followed of the three, Shellenberger, still had more than 357,000 Twitter followers before he posted his batch of the so-called Twitter Files. He now has more than 480,000. Taibbi started December with less than 750,000 Twitter followers and now boasts more than 1.5 million.

And perhaps most importantly, all three have been outspoken about what they see as the excesses of the Left on cultural issues such as speech and corporate influence.

“To me, the media’s response to the Twitter Files is itself a scandal,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner.

The New York Times’ shameless Covid contortions Even as China relaxes its lockdown, the US liberal media are still whipping up fear. Heather MacDonald

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/14/the-new-york-times-shameless-covid-contortions/

The New York Times has just discovered that some Americans are no longer wearing masks. Welcome to life in the mainstream-media bubble.

The Times sent its reporters last week across Los Angeles County to assess the state of Covid precautions. Los Angeles is at the epicentre of a national movement among blue-state health officials and their press allies to scare the public back into Covid submissiveness. The director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer, has proclaimed: ‘This is the time for everyone to put their mask back on right now… We need to get the mask back on.’ If residents insist on holding a Christmas party, it should be held outside and guests should be tested before arrival, according to Ferrer. The Los Angeles Times has been backing up her campaign, with recent headlines like: ‘Dangerous weeks ahead in LA County as coronavirus suddenly surges.’ ‘Dangerous’ here equates to around a dozen Covid deaths per day in a county of nearly 10million people. LA County, like other jurisdictions, does not distinguish deaths with Covid from deaths from Covid, making even that small tally a likely exaggeration.

Last week, the New York Times decided to venture forth into this ‘dangerous’ surge. And what it found was apparently stunning and newsworthy. For instance, it reports that a mother and children shopped for groceries in the south-east corner of Los Angeles County without masks, while half of the employees in that same Boyle Heights supermarket wore no face coverings. (The New York Times was seemingly not surprised by the 50 per cent of workers who still were wearing face coverings.)

ABC, CBS, And Other Corporate Media Black Out Coverage Of ‘Twitter Files’ Story By: Madeline Osburn

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/13/abc-cbs-and-other-corporate-media-black-out-coverage-of-twitter-files-story/

Corporate media outlets have all but refused to cover the unfolding “Twitter Files” published by independent journalists including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi throughout the last week. According to Grabien, a news clipping and transcribing service, a search of its database finds that among the three major networks — ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News — the words “Twitter Files” have been discussed on air a collective total of one time since Dec. 2, the day Elon Musk announced the release of the first batch.

When it comes to cable network coverage, CNN and MSNBC have mentioned the words “Twitter Files” just 13 times and 17 times, respectively, since Dec. 2, compared to Fox News’s 374 mentions of the keywords. A Monday search on CNN’s website for “Twitter Files” turns up zero search results for any coverage of the independent journalists’ ongoing investigations.

The media blackout is odd, considering that the first five parts of the ongoing series have covered some of the corporate media’s previously favorite topics such as the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and Twitter’s subsequent banning of former President Donald Trump, which have received in-depth coverage for the last two years.

Other significant findings uncovered in the documents Musk turned over to Weiss and Taibbi include the role former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker played in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the tech company’s frequent secret meetings with federal intelligence agencies in the run-up to the 2020 election. While most Americans are not frequent users of Twitter, the company’s relationship with government intelligence agencies and its apparent influence on federal elections is undeniably worthy of major network coverage.

Left-Wing Journalists Are Truly Some of the Worst People on the Planet Protecting the powerful from the truth. by Derek Hunter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/left-wing-journalists-are-truly-some-of-the-worst-people-on-the-planet/

Think what you will of Donald Trump – personally, I could use a break from hearing about and from him – no one did more to expose the hypocrisy of the left than he did, and he didn’t actually do anything to cause it except to exist. Hillary Clinton was supposed to win in 2016, breaking the “glass ceiling” and ushering in an era of GOP destruction. Instead, she lost to this “monster,” setting off Democrats, both with and without press passes, into a rage-spiral that not only hasn’t stopped, but has only sped up. That included “conservatives” who seem to resent political victories they claimed they always wanted simply because they were done on his watch.

Donald Trump didn’t make them insane, his existence simply sped up the process – pulling back the curtain, or actually pulling the curtain and the rod off the wall completely. I truly despise them.

The reason for the title is watching these people “cover” the revelations of Twitter’s internal deliberations and actions on the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election is something to behold that should make everyone sick, I know it does me. I won’t go so far as to say it would have changed the outcome of the election, but to pretend it couldn’t have is asinine. And the people pretending otherwise deserve a swift smack across the face with the cold, dead fish of reality, if only metaphorically.

But viewers and readers of the leftist media wouldn’t have any idea of the story at all. CBS News didn’t bother covering it at all. The Washington Post and New York Times burned their calories downplaying collusion between government and soon to be government officials and the silencing of a media outlet’s major story because they’re on the other team.