RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/15/an-implicit-admission-that-the-news-is-slanted/

Media giant Gannett, owner of USA Today, announced last week it was cutting back on newspaper opinion pages within its chain, the largest in the country. Apparently editors decided “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.” Or, put another way, they don’t need opinion pages when the “news” is doing a fine job of tacitly telling readers what to think.

In the words of a Fox News report, Gannett is “scaling back its opinion pages in an effort to combat a perception of having a political bias” and a political agenda. But that seems more like a cover than a genuine reason. Since when has the leftist corporate media been shy about coloring the events of the day, and worshipping at the altar of their political gods?

In just the years since Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential candidacy, the media, and not just newspapers, used “news” reports to do all they could to first run Trump’s campaign aground, and when that didn’t work, diligently peddle the narrative that Trump was a Russian stooge and had to be removed from office.

For anyone who even lightly scrolled through the media’s output during the Trump term, it was nigh on impossible to avoid claim after claim that the “bombshell” revelation which was going to bring down Trump was in the air on its way to the target. The media were – and still are – obsessed with Trump.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-soros-funded-takeover-of-spanish-language-radio/

This week brought revelations that a consortium including multiple interested leftist participants has banded together to attempt to buy a number of Spanish-language radio stations across the country. The effort, backed in part by George Soros, is unsurprising. But it is also an underrated indication of the weakness of vision on both the left and the right.

It illustrates an approach used by the left toward Hispanic outreach, which has been consistently top-down. As opposed to listening to the priorities of these communities and making any effort to meet them where they are, the Left has instead tried to assert and propagandize to them. Univision, Fusion, and a number of other left-driven media outlets have attempted to control the narrative heard by Spanish speakers in America.

This approach has been largely ineffective, much to the surprise of those who predicted “demography as destiny” decades ago.

Hispanic Americans, it turns out, actually think for themselves. Instead of prioritizing things in accordance with the wishes of those advancing Critical Race Theory propaganda, and those who advocate for black and brown coalitions in favor of socialist policies, those who are descended from or often related to people who have experienced socialism firsthand recoil from that prospect when it comes to America.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/09/youtubes-selective-ban-on-stolen-election-videos/

The New York Post reports that YouTube deleted a video it posted about the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion into the Capitol building.

“In the video, Aaron Mostofsky, son of a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, explains why he was compelled to come to the Capitol, namely ‘to express … [his] opinion as a free American … that this election was stolen’,” the Post says.

YouTube’s censors says they deleted the video because “it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all,” and that “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud … changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed.”

Early in May, YouTube deleted a video of Donald Trump’s speech to the Heritage Foundation because Trump said the 2020 election was rigged. The censors told Heritage that “violated our policies pertaining to elections misinformation.” 

The Post argues that YouTube owner Google is effectively carrying out the Biden administration’s censorship campaign.

“The administration’s domestic-terror strategy had called for ‘enhancing faith in government’ by countering ‘dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence,’ and vowed to ‘collaborate on addressing terrorist content … with technology companies.’”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/twisting-truth-about-tinseltown-bruce-bawer/

If you happened to take a look at the New York Times website a few days ago – specifically, on June 2 – you’d have found the usual daily mix of predictable left-wing claptrap. One article smeared the Proud Boys as a “violent” gang of “far-right nationalist[s]”; another lamented the verdict in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial because it afforded the unacceptable spectacle of “a woman brought low,” while yet another asserted that Depp won “[b]ecause he’s a man.” Meanwhile the travel section pretended that Paris (a “City of Light” nowadays only when Muslim gangs are setting cars and churches ablaze) is still the romantic locale of Gigi and Funny Face, and the op-ed page offered an essay headlined “Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians” and an argument that the main problem with the “capable, decent men and women” who make up the Biden administration is that they’re insufficiently eager to make nice with China.

But the day’s most ludicrous piece of agitprop was an essay in which Times film critic A. O. Scott actually tried to make the case that Hollywood isn’t left-wing. Yes, he admitted, the film industry is “a hub of Democratic Party fund-raising and activism” – but, hey, there are also plenty of “suspected conservatives” in La La Land (he didn’t pause to ponder why they’re only “suspected”), and in any case, he suggested, it all evens out, because during the era of the “Red Scare” Hollywood conservatives subjected liberals to “blacklisting and betrayal.” Um, no. Here’s the real story: through much of the 1930s and 40s, the writing and acting branches in Hollywood were dominated by ruthless, card-carrying Stalinists like Dalton Trumbo, who sought to use their power to propagandize for Communism; it was they, not conservatives, who aimed to crush the liberals in their midst; and it was they, not liberals, who were later targeted by the HUAC hearings. “Betrayal”? It was these Stalinists, enemies of their country and tools of the Kremlin, who were the traitors.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/06/americans-pretty-much-disgusted-with-the-big-media-ii-tipp-poll/

Among major American institutions, the media have had a particularly rough ride over the past year. Public trust in the media’s integrity and performance has soured significantly in recent months, with big media credibility continuing to sink, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The most recent data come from our May online nationwide poll of 1,320 adults, taken from May 4-6. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 points.

Each month since March of 2021, poll respondents have been asked the following two questions:

“Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”
“Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, RealClearPolitics, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

For the more mainstream “established” media in the first question, the poll shows how poorly in the public’s esteem the news outlets are: Only 37% of those who responded said they had either “a lot of trust” (15%) or “quite a bit of trust” (22%) in the media.

Meanwhile, 56% said they either had “little trust” (28%) or “no trust at all” (28%), for an overall negative trust reading of -19 points. An abysmal reading given the central informational role the media play in our daily lives.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/06/04/cnn-highlights-bidens-struggle-to-break-through-while-ignoring-his-real-issues-n1603294

Bless CNN’s heart. What was once the most trusted name in news has blinded itself to the reality that a rapidly increasing number of people have fallen out of love with Joe Biden.

There’s probably a staffer in a corner at CNN’s headquarters rocking back and forth, whispering to himself, “it’s a messaging problem.” And that delusion is beginning to show in CNN’s coverage of the president and his team.

Earlier this week, Edward-Isaac Dovere published a piece at CNN.com with the laughable headline “Beneath Biden’s struggle to break through is a deeper dysfunction among White House aides.” The article is full of hand-wringing analysis that members of Biden’s team are blaming each other for failures (probably true); that Biden is struggling with the disconnect between a tough, serious president and a jovial, back-slapping ice cream lover (also probably true); and that the president is the product of an older media age who is more concerned with newspaper coverage than Twitter and Instagram (certainly true).

“Aides regularly talk about how little traction they’re getting from one-off Biden appearances or events and then — whether on inflation, the baby formula shortage or mass shootings or the other crises landing on Biden’s desk — he’s often left looking like he’s in a reactive crouch on the issues that matter most to voters rather than setting the agenda,” Dovere writes. “Sometimes clipped moments from those speeches that the White House puts out on social media generate huge traffic but, at least as often, moments from the President appearing to be caught off-guard go viral on their own.”

There’s even more deflection of what the real issues plaguing the Biden administration are.

“Biden aides cite a range of other factors — a political press corps still hooked on Trump-style melodrama, a news environment dominated by Ukraine and pandemic, a Secret Service buffer that limits what Biden can do, lingering anxiety that he’ll catch Covid-19 and possibly become really sick,” Dovere points out.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/23/the-left-will-never-stop-smearing-us-n1599368

Without fail, when there’s a mass shooting, the mainstream media will collude with the Democratic Party to blame conservatives.

In 2019, a deranged man named Brenton Tarrant shot and killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was a self-proclaimed socialist and an environmentalist who hated capitalists and trade. One motive for his attack was to bring more gun control to the country. He called himself an “eco-fascist by nature” and declared that “the nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.”

The media called him a “far-right extremist.”

Months later, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people at Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Crusius proclaimed to have the same views as Tarrant and wrote in his manifesto that “Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades.”

The media called him a “far-right extremist.”

Last Saturday, a deranged teenager shot up a Buffalo supermarket, killing ten people. According to his manifesto, he is a former communist who now says he falls in the “mild-moderate authoritarian left category,” and added that, “you can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harpers-mag-russiagate-steele-dossier-holman-jenkins-cockburn-clinton-trump-putin-11652827839?mod=opinion_major_pos18

Holman Jenkins, Jr. has for the past several years done an admirable but thankless job exposing the Russiagate fraud by focusing on the sleazy and now thoroughly discredited Steele dossier, which posited a conspiracy between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government. But when he writes about the cowardice of the “90% of the media and 100% of the foreign-policy class in Washington” that encouraged Russiagate to bloom and poison our politics (“What Did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America?” Business World, May 14), he should take a moment to credit the 10% that didn’t go along for the ride, even before the Steele dossier was published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed and its feckless editor, Ben Smith.

Andrew Cockburn’s cover story in the December 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine blew the whistle loud and clear on the Clintons’ drive to blame Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Vladimir Putin instead of on Hillary and Bill Clinton themselves. So shocked were the Clintons and the establishment media by Mr. Trump’s dreadful triumph that they faulted a nasty foreigner from central casting, and some alleged hacker henchmen, rather than examining the corrupt personal conduct or the anti-working-class politics of America’s first couple of neoliberal con artistry. Not all liberals were in the bag, Mr. Jenkins.

John R. MacArthur

President and publisher Harper’s Magazine

New York