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MEDIA

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The Hill Liz Peek: Desperate Democrats cry “misinformation” to silence criticism of Kamala Harris

By on October 13th, 2024

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4928306-desperate-democrats-cry-misinformation-to-squash-criticism-of-kamala-harris

For days now, the liberal media and its Democratic allies have seemed much more concerned about Republicans spreading “misinformation” than about the real-life suffering of North Carolinians.   

For proof, look no further than this blizzard of headlines — all from Politico:  

“The worst I have ever seen’: Disinformation chaos hammers FEMA”
“After the deluge, the lies: Misinformation and hoaxes about Helene cloud the recovery” 
“Elon Musk is piling onto all the hurricane disinformation, hampering relief efforts” 
“FEMA director on misinformation: ‘Truly dangerous narrative’” 

Politico is certainly not alone, ABC ran with this story on Tuesday: “Ahead of election, experts warn Hurricane Helene misinformation is ‘just the beginning.’” 

CBS contributed this one on Monday: “Misinformation has surged following Hurricane Helene.” 

 That’s the same CBS that reportedly doctored video of Kamala Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview to make the Democratic candidate appear more intelligent. So their concern about misinformation is apparently episodic.

It’s almost as though a memo went out to Democrat-friendly media allies, prompting a concerted pushback against criticism of the Biden-Harris White House’s response to Hurricane Helene. It’s not surprising. 

The pile-up of delayed, tone-deaf and embarrassing responses to the devastating storm from the administration and Kamala Harris has been damaging; her team is desperate to contain the damage. 

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Media Maintains ‘Wall of Silence’ on First Gentleman #MeToo Scandal “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.” by Daniel Greenfield

By on October 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/media-maintains-wall-of-silence-on-first-gentleman-metoo-scandal/

Here’s the scorecard so far.

Doug Emhoff, Kamala’s powerful lawyer hubby, admitted to impregnating his nanny during his first marriage. The status of the child is unknown, but there are allegations that she suffered a miscarriage.

A recent report described Emhoff hitting an ex-girlfriend in public. The media refused to report on the allegation and only reported on Emhoff’s denial of the allegation.

Half of the political world focused Wednesday on a Daily Mail report that second gentleman Doug Emhoff “forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man” at Cannes in 2012. Others (including Semafor) haven’t matched the reporting, and as of Wednesday evening the incident didn’t appear in The New York Times or top outlets. But the allegations are a dominant narrative in conservative media: Megyn Kelly’s coverage had more than 150,000 views on YouTube, while Trump aide Stephen Miller demanded answers. In a statement to Semafor, a spokesperson for Emhoff said “this report is untrue,” and that “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”

It’s striking that “half of the political world” is focused on an allegation the media won’t report on.

Instead, the media is reporting on such urgent stories as “Doug Emhoff On Andy Samberg’s ‘SNL’ Impression: “I Approve”, “Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff to visit Arizona” and “Michael Stipe, Jason Isbell Tell Doug Emhoff Why They Endorse Kamala Harris”.

Isn’t journalism awesome?

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The Forever Hate Even on the anniversary of the 10/7 pogrom, the media can’t bring itself to honor dead Jews. by Mark Tapson

By on October 7th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-forever-hate/

We are at the first anniversary now of one of the most grotesque episodes of ancient savagery wreaked upon the modern world: the October 7 attacks in Israel which left over 1200 innocents dead and many more wounded and/or taken hostage by the subhuman terror organization Hamas. But instead of solemn, worldwide commemoration of this ongoing nightmare, with unified sympathy and support for the Israeli victims and survivors, we are treated to the Left-wing counter-narrative of pro-Hamas, anti-Zionist protests and opinion pieces in the news media demonizing the Jewish state and drowning out the echoing cries of the Israeli dead.

Over the course of the last year, details and evidence of the massacre unfolded in eyewitness accounts, documentaries, and even video and testimony provided by the gleefully sadistic terrorists themselves. Decent people everywhere who dared to look found themselves staring into the bottomless abyss of Evil.

But the Left-dominated news media are not decent people. They burn with a forever hate for Jews and the Jewish state, and cannot bring themselves to see the terrorism of Hamas as anything less honorable than “resistance” against an oppressor state – a white oppressor, of course, because that’s how the reductive lie of identity politics works: Jews are perceived as oppressors and the so-called Palestinians are perceived as the oppressed, so Jews must be aligned with “white” or “bad” and the Palestinians with “black” or “good.” History, facts, truth, nuance – all of that must be cast aside so as not to undercut the simplistic, neo-Marxist power dynamics through which the woke view the world.

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Rachel Maddow Smears Vance as a Fascist Speech-Squasher Is what the MSNBC host does really “news”? by Tim Graham

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rachel-maddow-smears-vance-as-a-fascist-speech-squasher/

The Democrats were distraught when Rachel Maddow negotiated with her Comcast paymasters to only do her show one night a week. What would the Left do with their Maddow magic cut by 80%?

For media critics, Maddow has been tougher to analyze as a cable “news” host. She goes on long pseudo-intellectual benders of historical analysis and then tries to bring it right up to today’s politics. She especially loves identifying Hitler sympathizers from the 1930s and attaching it to today’s Republicans. It’s like making Joy Reid sound more ponderous and in-depth, even if it’s not.

On Sept. 30, on the cusp of the vice presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.

Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?

We’re supposed to overlook that you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. The last survey found only 1% of Harvard professors identified as conservative. The idea that “Harvard hates America” has been around for decades, and it’s been true for decades.

As Vance put it, “You go to Harvard and put your preferred pronouns in your bio and learn to hate people in the heartland.”

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Cooke: The Oprah Interview Eliminated All Pretense — the Press and Harris Are on the Same Side By Sarah Schutte

By on September 21st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cooke-the-oprah-interview-eliminated-all-pretense-the-press-and-harris-are-on-the-same-side/

National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said the upside of Kamala Harris’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was that viewers got to see clearly the case of “an interviewee and an interviewer who were manifestly on the same side.

“I really do appreciate,” he said, “that the press is at long last cut out the pretense in that Oprah Winfrey spoke at the Democratic Convention and endorsed Harris. And that is the default position of most journalists, but they’re just not honest enough to make it clear.”

Cooke pointed out that the interview, in which Harris was asked how she would bring down prices, “really verged into metaphysical . . . almost poetry. And Winfrey sat there and said, ‘Yes, yes, mm, mm, mm, mm, yes, mm.’

“It’s absurd,” Cooke said. “I am aware by now that people are voting against, and that they are going to pretend, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, that their candidate is therefore fine, but they’re not, they’re not fine. Kamala Harris is not an acceptable candidate for president of the United States. She can’t answer elementary questions. She can’t talk. And the reason that she can’t talk is because she can’t think. . . . The mouth follows the mind.

“There are lots of people in this country with whom I strongly disagree who are able to present their worldview in a manner that is comprehensible and even compelling. But she is not one of them.”

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Why Do Media Think Democrats Are Worth Cheating For?

By on September 20th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/20/why-do-media-think-democrats-are-worth-cheating-for/

It would be helpful to voters to know that a “whistleblower” says ABC rigged last week’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But outside of conservative media, it’s being largely ignored, because the legacy press covers its own and as zealously as it does the Democratic Party. Whether the claims are true or not – the existence of the whistleblower remains unconfirmed – the mainstream media’s loyalty to Democrats is uncomfortably similar to the relationship Pravda had with the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.

To quickly recap, the unnamed whistleblower said ABC agreed to fact-check Trump while ensuring “Harris would not face comparable scrutiny.” The plan was so detailed that “various people were assigned to fact check observations it was perceived candidate Trump would make during the debate.”

“In fact,” says the whistleblower, the “Harris campaign required assurances that Donald Trump would be fact-checked.”

These agreements were reached on calls that the Trump campaign was not a part of although all discussions regarding the rules and negotiations were supposed to include both sides.

The affidavit also says Harris was provided with sample questions that, while not the exact questions that would be asked, nevertheless “covered similar topics that would appear during the debate.”

There were also issues that could not be raised – Joe Biden’s health; Harris’ performance as San Francisco’s district attorney; her brother-in-law and “key campaign adviser” Tony West, who allegedly “fleeced taxpayers for billions to give to left-wing groups and lawyers” – since they would reflect poorly on Harris.

“I have observed a pronounced bias against Donald Trump within ABC News,” the affiant continues, while also noting “many” ABC employees “questioned the clear bias that is well known throughout the company.”

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Heather Mac Donald Trump Made Them Do It The New York Times finds victim-blaming repellent—except when the victim is the former president.

By on September 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-blames-trump

The New York Times devotedly follows the cardinal rule of liberalism—never blame the victim!—at least for officially designated victims of American racism and classism. Slavery, for example, not higher rates of criminal offending, is responsible for blacks’ “unequal involvement in the criminal justice system.” If unwed mothers are poor, the reason lies in heartless welfare rules, not in the decision to have a child out of wedlock.

But when it comes to Donald Trump, victim-blaming is de rigueur. According to the Times’s premier Trump-basher, Peter Baker, Trump is responsible for the attempted assassinations against him. “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him,” writes Baker in today’s lead print story. Trump “inspires” the attacks against him. It is hard to imagine this line of thinking applied to other victims of assassination attempts—Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, for example—but it is as tautologically true in their case as in Trump’s.

Baker recycles the fiction that MAGA supporters, inflamed by Trump’s fulminations regarding Haitian peticide, made bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio. (In fact, as Ohio governor Mike DeWine revealed, the menacing came from bad actors abroad.) But relentless Democratic rhetoric about Trump’s dictatorial intentions and the evils perpetrated by Supreme Court justices, among other alleged conservative opponents of democracy, has no apparent bearing on the death threats and attempts against Trump, conservative justices, and Republican politicians.

The elite press’s inability to escape its ideological bubble and to apply neutral standards of analysis could not be more acute. That inability is as responsible for today’s political hatreds as anything Trump has ever said.

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The Media’s Criminal Misreporting on Crime

By on September 17th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/17/the-medias-criminal-misreporting-on-crime/

‘President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

That was ABC News’ David Muir “fact checking” Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris.

Two days later, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of its national crime victimization survey, which showed that the number of victims of violent crime was 41% higher in 2023 than in 2020.

There were almost 170,000 more rapes, 300,000 more robberies, 1.4 million more assaults, 300,000 more claims of domestic violence, and almost 400,000 more crimes with a violent weapon.

This wasn’t a surprise. That same survey showed a significant jump in crime victimization in 2022 – something we noted in this space back in July. (“Now They’re Gaslighting Us About Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’”)

And in January,  the Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks crimes in 39 cities, found homicide rates were 18% higher in 2023 than in 2019, aggravated assaults up 8%, gun assaults up 32%, and carjackings up 93%.

Meanwhile, polls keep finding that the public thinks crime is getting worse.

But instead of trying to understand the mismatch, the press just treated the public like idiots.

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The BBC’s Israelophobia is even worse than you think A new report exposes the true, shocking extent of the BBC’s moral decay.Brendan O’Neill

By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/09/the-bbcs-israelophobia-is-even-worse-than-you-think/

Remember when the BBC went nuts at Nigel Farage over comments made by some of the candidates for his Reform Party? It was in the run-up to the General Election. Farage was taking part in a BBC debate. Presenter Fiona Bruce huffed and puffed at him for half the show about three candidates who’d said nasty things about immigrants, including calling them ‘savages’ who should ‘get off [their] lazy arses’. Looking back, we can see what a load of old cant that was, for the BBC employed far worse bigots than those Reform racists. It employed people who openly praised the worst act of Jew murder since the Holocaust.

A new report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October is a sobering read. It’s outright jarring in parts. Some of it is pretty ‘dog bites man’. Anyone who’s watched any of the Beeb’s pained output since 7 October will not be surprised to learn it has exhibited a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. But they’ll be horrified – I hope – to read that the BBC used journalists who had ‘shown sympathy for Hamas’. Including one who described Hamas’s pogrom as a ‘morning of hope’, and another who appeared to mock the Jewish State even as its citizens were being raped and murdered, saying that ‘Israel… is crying in the corner’.

The Beeb has done many awful things of late. There’s its Brexit-bashing. Its indoctrination of schoolkids with bollocks about ‘white privilege’. Its gratingly woke podcasts, including one asking how ‘white women’ can avoid becoming ‘Karens’. Its transformation of Doctor Who into naff LGBTQ propaganda in an effort to stir the throng from its supposed bigoted stupor. But this – its association with journalists so anti-Israel that one defended a Lebanese reporter who had said ‘Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned’ – is surely the worst. We’re paying for this fascist-adjacent nonsense?

The new report is called ‘The Asserson Report: The Israel-Hamas War and the BBC’. It was overseen by Trevor Asserson, the British-Israeli lawyer. He deployed around 20 data scientists and 20 legal minds to analyse no fewer than nine million words of BBC output from the four-month period of 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024. The researchers claim to have identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. Time and again after the 7 October pogrom, they say, the BBC’s output soft-soaped Hamas’s atrocities while depicting Israel as ‘militaristic and aggressive’.

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For Republican Candidates, Media Hit Jobs Are a Fact of Life By Becket Adams

By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/for-republican-candidates-media-hit-jobs-are-a-fact-of-life/

Media outlets took J. D. Vance’s words out of context and made him look heartless as a result. Should we be surprised?

The press’s coverage of Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has a peculiar quality to it.

Marc Caputo, national political reporter for the Bulwark, last week put it well: The reporting is not merely “negative” but “reliably” so.

Case in point: The Associated Press on September 5 grossly misrepresented the Ohio senator’s response to a school shooting in Georgia in which four people were murdered.

“JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” said an AP headline.

The Hill likewise declared, “JD Vance calls for tightened school security, calls school shootings a ‘fact of life.’”

Here’s what Vance actually said (my emphasis):

I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able.

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