RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/17/looks-like-joe-biden-just-lost-the-new-york-times/

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

And even more remarkable is what comes next. Irwin writes:

You can draw a direct line from a specific policy decision that Biden and congressional Democrats made this past winter to some of the inflation happening now.

In designing the stimulus that Congress passed in March, Biden’s administration went big, with $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief — on top of a separate $900 billion package that passed three months earlier. Put the two together, and $2.8 trillion in federal money has been coursing through the economy this year while economic activity has trended only a few hundred billion dollars a year short of what mainstream analysts would consider full health.

The fact that the Times, along with others in the mainstream media, admits that inflation is a problem is in itself a noteworthy development, since for months it insisted that it was just a data anomaly – one that Republicans were trying to exploit for political gain.

Now, with prices for many common household goods having gone up by double digits over the past few months and no end in sight for the trend, the inflation story is impossible to ignore. 

But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

In April, for example, a USA Today “fact check” told readers that COVID-19 was “to blame for spike in lumber prices, not Biden.” In June, it ran another saying that “Rising gas prices due to high demand and low supply, not Biden’s policies.”

The next month, AP declared that “House GOP falsely blames Biden for gas prices.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/16/please-stop-trusting-anything-the-mainstream-media-report/

America’s mainstream, or legacy, media have an agenda. It’s not to subjectively report the truth but to further leftist ideas and policies, all of which are toxic. The press’ disinformation campaign to prop up critical race theory is yet another example of its effort to deceive, manipulate, and divide on behalf of the party it is constantly shilling for.

A new study from the American Enterprise Institute found the media focus on schools teaching the history of slavery and racism, and largely ignore the “bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity.”

AEI’s Frederick M. Hess “examined all news accounts addressing CRT published over a one-year period by four major newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today),” and several “influential education press outlets.” All are news accounts. None are opinion pieces.

“Given that this admittedly revolutionary worldview is what motivates many objections to CRT-influenced pedagogy, one would expect news accounts to routinely address it,” Hess writes in “Media’s Misleading Portrayal of the Fight over Critical Race Theory.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/washington-post-corrects-removes-reporting-steele-dossier

The Washington Post did something many other liberal outlets have failed to do and corrected previous reporting that relied on the discredited Steele dossier that accused former President Donald Trump of an extensive conspiracy with the Russians.

“The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusan American businessman as a key source of the ‘Steele dossier,’ a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump,” Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote. 

“The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as ‘Source D,’ the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele,” Farhi continued. 

The post added editor’s notes, amended headlines, removed sections identifying Millian as the source and deleted an accompanying video summarizing the article. 

“Source D, according to the dossier, alleged that Russian intelligence had learned that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to defile a Moscow hotel room once occupied by President Obama and Michelle Obama and possessed a video recording of the incident,” Farhi wrote. “The allegation, which the dossier said was confirmed by a second person described only as ‘Source E,’ has never been substantiated.”

The Post’s correction came as other news outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, have been criticized for failing to adjust reporting after Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the Trump-Russia probe further discredited the already-shaky dossier. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10193997/Lawyer-representing-Project-Veritas-boss-James-OKeefe-suggests-feds-leaked-legal-memos.html

An attorney for the founder of Project Veritas has accused the Department of Justice of tipping off the New York Times about recent raids on current and former employees, while suggesting federal prosecutors may have also leaked the group’s legal communications.

Project Veritas, the conservative activist group founded by James O’Keefe, has come under federal scrutiny in relation to the alleged theft of the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley, which the group considered publishing but never did.

The FBI conducted raids at O’Keefe’s New York home and those of others connected to Project Veritas, seizing O’Keefe’s cell phone among other items.

On Thursday, the New York Times published a report based on memos from the group’s lawyer, revealing his legal advice on the group’s use of false identities and undercover filming, tactics that are eschewed by most modern journalists.

O’Keefe’s attorney Harmeet Dhillon in an interview on Thursday night slammed the report as a ‘hit piece’ and questioned whether the DOJ had leaked the legal memos to the Times, an extraordinary and possibly illegal step.

‘I can’t say how the New York Times got this information, but they got it in a way that is illegal and unethical,’ Dhillon told Fox News.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/julio-rivera/2021/11/11/selective-media-mutes-coverage-of-violent-attack-against-interior-department-n1531826

It seems like ever since January 6th of this year, after the unfortunate protests against the certification of last November’s presidential election, all some media outlets have wanted to talk about is, well, January 6th.

On Democratically controlled Capitol Hill, we’ve already seen the formation of a select committee that is more interested in the effort to “investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex” than in examining the series of events that caused many Americans to feel that the election results were deserving of additional scrutiny.

Members of this so-called “January 6th committee” are now reportedly working on potential legislation to modify the 134-year-old Electoral Count Act, in what they claim is an effort to ensure that a losing party can never subvert the results of a presidential election, while clearly ignoring the volumes of evidence displaying the rampant irregularities associated with the last election.

So, while this political theater continues to play out, one recent event that invoked similar imagery and disorder to January 6th continues to completely fly under the radar — the siege against the Interior Department by climate change activists just weeks ago. 

https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/ny-times-latest-bid-to-double-down-on-rewriting-us-history/

Some people just don’t take correction well. The New York Times Magazine was rebuked two summers ago for the 1619 Project, an essay collection that proposed, as the Times itself announced, “to reframe American history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Now the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, has doubled down on that in a new piece this week.

From the outset, the idea was not simply to broaden our understanding of America’s founding and history, but to replace it.

That was always wrong. America was not unique because of slavery, which predates recorded history and existed all around the world well after 1776. Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, Egyptians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Turks, Arabs and many African societies had slaves. The word “slave” derives from “Slav.” In the century after Columbus, more Russian slaves were carried across the Black Sea to the Ottoman Empire than African slaves across the Atlantic.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was around half of the slave trade out of Africa, and at least 90 percent of that trade went to places outside the United States. The Spanish brought African slaves to Georgia and Florida nearly a century before 1619, and into the 1640s, there were more British slaves held in Africa than African slaves held in British colonies.

What made America unique was its democratic system of limited government and its ideals of individual rights — both of which started in Virginia in 1619 with the first elected legislature in the Western Hemisphere. From the beginning, America struggled with the fact that slavery did not conform with the ideals of the Bill of Rights, and ultimately fought a Civil War over it in which hundreds of thousands died to free 4 million black Americans.

The 1619 Project had more specific problems. Its organizer and lead essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, claimed without evidence that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” She waved off warnings from the historian reviewing this claim before publication. Under a barrage of criticism from a Who’s Who of leading academic historians, the Times first wrote a lengthy defense and later grudgingly reworded this, but both Hannah-Jones and Silverstein refuse to call this a “correction.” They also quietly deleted the reference to “1619 as our true founding.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/maybe-its-time-the-washington-post-and-the-new-york-times-return-those-russian-collusion-pulitzers

Did you know there’s a process whereby an undeserved Pulitzer Prize may be returned?

Disgraced former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke in 1981 returned hers after it was discovered she fabricated the feature story that won her the award in the first place.

It’s worth revisiting this factoid this week with the news the primary source for the infamous Steele Dossier, which launched two solid years of white-knuckled award-winning Russian collusion news coverage, has been indicted on five counts of lying to federal investigators about how and where he got his supposed information.

Igor Danchenko is accused of making several significant false claims, one of the biggest being he was informed of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Moscow and the Trump 2016 campaign by a man federal authorities identify only as the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

The federal indictment plainly accuses Danchenko of contributing multiple exaggerations, rumors, and flat-out lies to the Steele Dossier. The indictment also alleges Danchenko received a good deal of his supposed information from a longtime Democratic Party operative with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign instead of actual intelligence experts with keen and relevant knowledge regarding the Kremlin’s inner workings. Danchenko told federal investigators he did not receive certain information from a Democratic operative. Federal authorities say this is a lie. The indictment likewise hints at the possibility Danchenko worked recently for a Russian intelligence agency.