RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/08/veteran-miami-herald-reporter-caught-coaching-democrats-to-cheat/

Long-time Miami Herald reporter Mary Ellen Klas was just caught red-handed coaching Democrats on how to challenge Republican redistricting in Florida.

For conservatives and Republicans, the story is as old as time. But some amazing revelations reflecting the current state of journalism, including indisputable evidence of Klas’ partisanship, help illustrate our current predicament. Klas, who is no newbie, is the Miami Herald’s capitol bureau chief in Tallahassee, where she has covered Florida politics since the 1990s. One wonders how often she has freelanced as a political consultant over the years. In this instance, she was cavalier enough to get caught by a Republican Senate staffer who was sitting right there.

A public records request netted an audio recording by an aide to Senate President Wilton Simpson of Klas talking to state Senator Randolph Bracy, an Orlando Democrat currently running for Congress. The audio, Simpson wrote, showed Klas was “seeking to pre-litigate the 2022 redistricting cycle, pitting Senate counsel against expert witnesses frequently used by plaintiffs in litigation against the state, thereby creating a manipulated legislative record to be used in the courts.”

The story broke with Florida Power and Light—a favorite target for Klas over the years and the largest power company in the nation—taking the extreme measure of publicly going on the attack against Klas and the Herald. FPL on Wednesday launched a website called Truth Matters that details Klas’ duplicitous and partisan coverage against the power company. Giant companies rarely go to such lengths, particularly those as heavily regulated as a utility. But apparently FPL felt it had no choice, and the website makes clear why. 

The final straw for FPL was a December 20, 2021 “story” by Klas claiming FPL was using “dark money” and lobbyists to write legislation that would hamstring rooftop solar. In the increasingly dirty world of the partisan media, it’s important to note that this story was done in conjunction with Floodlight, an environmentalist group which describes itself this way on its own site: “Floodlight investigates the corporate interests holding back climate action. We partner and co-publish with local journalists and national outlets . . . .” 

So there is not even the pretense of this being honest journalism. FPL vehemently denies the veracity of the story and wrote an opinion piece refuting it. But the Miami Herald refused to run the opinion piece and instead heavily edited it down, removing all criticism of the Herald and of Klas, and then ran it as a watery letter to the editor. Even that was just in the lightly read print edition, and not online.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/03/ii-tipp-poll-media-trust-took-a-serious-beating-in-2021/

For the big media that dominate America’s cultural and political life, 2021 was a dismal year when it comes to public trust. The prospects for 2022 are little better, as both the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, midterm elections and a growing problem with inflation loom. Year-end data from the I&I/TIPP Poll show little public optimism that the media will do a better job this year.

The data for the I&I/TIPP Poll Media Indexes stem from a survey of 1,301 adults, conducted online from Dec. 1-4 by TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, I&I’s polling partner. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.8 percentage points.

I&I/TIPP has tracked public opinion on the media since March of 2021. For simplicity’s sake, percentages have been converted to an index ranging from zero to 100, which makes for easy comparisons over time. Anything above 50 shows trust, below that, a lack of trust. 50 is neutral.

The year-end 2021 numbers tell a clear tale: The public became profoundly disappointed with the media’s performance during 2021.

For example, the I&I/TIPP Traditional Media Trust Index has fallen 15% since its inception last March. That, despite a rebound of 4.5 points, or 11.6%, to 43.3 in December off the record low of 38.8 set in November. This index is made up of major media, such as the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, and so on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/project_veritas_scores_a_significant_victory_over_the_new_york_times.html

After the DOJ authorized the FBI to conduct dawn raids on Project Veritas’s people because they briefly possessed, but neither stole nor published, the diary of Joe Biden’s drug-addicted daughter, Ashley, the New York Times “coincidentally” received and published copies of memos that Project Veritas’s attorneys had written regarding legal standards for investigative reporting—while Project Veritas was already involved in litigation with the Times. On Friday, a New York judge ordered that the Times must return every document and destroy every electronic file. It’s a huge victory for Project Veritas and an appropriate rebuke to the Times, which acts more sleazily than any supermarket tabloid ever has.

You can read more details about the back story here. If you don’t want the long version, the short version is best summarized in Michael Cernovich’s tweet on the subject:

Project Veritas sued the Times to recover the stolen material, and the Times promptly sought shelter behind (a) the First Amendment and (b) New York Times Company v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), which concerned the Times’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. Without even reading that Supreme Court decision, one of the things that’s immediately obvious is that the 1971 case involved government documents that the Supreme Court concluded revealed matters of the utmost interest to the American public.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/from-media-bias-to-outright-partisanship.php

EXCERPT

In 2004, in an episode that became known as Rathergate, 60 Minutes tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents intended to put President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, back in the early 1970s, in a bad light. The fraud unraveled quickly as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy fakes that were full of substantive errors.

In less than 24 hours after the internet critique of the 60 Minutes story began, CBS News announced that it would conduct an investigation into what had happened. And it did. CBS News hired a former Attorney General of the U.S. to lead the investigation, and the report that he and others authored, the Thornburgh Report, was a devastating account of the dishonesty at CBS. Dan Rather was already gone by the time the report came out, and thereafter CBS fired Mary Mapes, the producer of the 60 Minutes segment, and several other employees.

The key point is that back in 2004, CBS News was seriously embarrassed that it had produced a false news report. It really did want, at least, to be seen as a fair and unbiased news source. And when the fraud was exposed, it took decisive action against the employees who had perpetrated it.

But over the next decade, that changed. Major news organizations have gone from being biased against conservatives to engaging in open warfare against conservatives. In 2016, Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the New York Times, publicly stated that the Times’ approach to covering the news had changed when it came to Donald Trump. No more neutrality, no more objectivity, the Times would openly attack Trump not just in its editorials, but in its news stories.

Shortly after Baquet made that announcement, the Russia collusion story hit the news, and it continued to dominate the news for the next two or three years.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/16/how-the-media-lost-touch-with-reality/

The American mainstream media are losing touch with reality. Journalists are increasingly drawn from elite backgrounds, and newsrooms are coalescing around a woke worldview. The media’s interest in race, gender and sexuality has exploded, while class issues and economic concerns struggle to get a look in. And when stories arrive that disrupt the woke narrative – from the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse to Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax – journalists often find themselves on the wrong side of the truth. How did the American media get into this state? And how can proper journalism recover?

Batya Ungar-Sargon is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. She joined Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: The woke have this notion that America is a white-supremacist country – that it always has been and it probably always will be. How do you think this notion of America being a permanently white-supremacist state came about?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: As racism and white supremacy in America have decreased, the obsession with race in the mainstream liberal media has absolutely skyrocketed. At the same time as our acceptance for things like interracial marriage has increased, the usage of the term ‘white supremacy’ in the liberal press has absolutely skyrocketed. It’s part of what sociologists call the ‘Great Awokening’. White liberals are becoming more extreme in their views on race than black and Latino Americans, who are much more socially conservative in general and are more moderate in their views on race.

The idea that all white people have white privilege that puts them above all people of colour started in the academy. It started with the postmodernist revolution, critical race theory (CRT), and the application of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist view in the cultural sphere. People will often call CRT ‘Marxist’, but the problem with CRT is an insufficiency of Marxism. There is no materialism in it. There is no class analysis.

This now common view that every interaction is about power is a very academic one. It was mainstreamed into American discourse through the media, which is increasingly populated by highly educated Americans, as opposed to the blue-collar journalists of yore. Today, 92 per cent of American journalists have a college degree.

https://www.city-journal.org/school-shootings-color-coded-parenting-standard-of-the-media

On April 19, 2021, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested in a text to Chicago’s mayor that the parents of two children recently killed in Chicago’s gang activity had “failed those kids.” Kempczinski’s text became public in November 2021, prompting widespread accusations of racism and calls for his resignation. Kempczinski confessed to his white privilege and apologized profusely for holding parents responsible for the fate of their children.

On December 3, a district attorney in Michigan filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley. The 15-year-old Crumbley allegedly killed four fellow students during a shooting rampage at his Oxford, Michigan high school on November 30. The prosecutor based her indictment of Crumbley’s parents on the fact that they had allowed Ethan to access a legally purchased handgun and ought to have known that the boy was primed to kill his classmates. The press, Democratic politicians, and gun control advocates greeted the homicide charges against the Crumbley parents with ecstatic approbation.

The divergent reactions to the Kempczinski text message and the Crumbleys’ indictment illuminate the different standards to which minority parents and white parents are held. When black juveniles perpetrate street violence, the press and public officials almost never ask: where were the parents? The less involved a parent is in a child’s life, the less society expects of him. These double standards may have a benign intent, but they enable a cultural dysfunction whose effects are thousands of times more lethal than school shootings.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/12/12/chris-wallace-leaving-fox-news-n1541001

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/12/12/chris-wallace-leaving-fox-news-n1541001

At the end of the Fox News broadcast of Fox News Sunday, veteran reporter Chris Wallace made the startling announcement that he was leaving the network after 18 years.

“It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this,” Wallace said.

Fox News released a statement, praising Wallace, saying, “We are extremely proud of our journalism and the stellar team that Chris Wallace was a part of for 18 years. The legacy of FOX News Sunday will continue with our star journalists, many of whom will rotate in the position until a permanent host is named.”

Wallace said he wants to “try something new” and to “go beyond” politics. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Wallace will join the new CNN streaming service.

There is much turmoil on the news side of Fox News as some of the reporters are pushing back against Tucker Carlson’s series on the Jan. 6 riots. Carlson’s controversial and speculative theories have made several Fox editors and reporters uncomfortable. There are also complaints that many of the opinion segments have crossed the line into conspiracy-mongering and fact-free opinion.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/john-hinderaker-and-joe-concha-speak-restoration-frontpagemagcom/

EXCERPT: Lawyer and co-Founder of the  Power Line blog John Hinderaker discusses  the evolution of media bias, fake news;

Transcript:

John Hinderaker: What I want to talk about in my presentation here is the evolution of the issue of media bias over the last 15 or 20 years.  And I want to do that primarily by comparing and contrasting two significant milestones in that story of media bias, which I think sheds a lot of light on how things have changed since the early 2000s.

So we started the website Power Line in 2002.  And media bias was one of the topics that we wrote on all the time.  And in those days, reporters for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were relatively accessible.  Their email addresses were public.  And if we emailed them, as we did rather frequently, to comment on and to critique their news stories, they usually would respond.  And so we got into some very interesting colloquies with some of those reporters, which resulted in a number of corrections being made to news stories.  Now, those corrections were generally subsilentio, unacknowledged, certainly, as to the source.  But nevertheless, that would sometimes happen.  Reporters in those days wanted at least to be seen as objective and fair, even though most were, in fact, biased in the direction of the Left.

Then in 2004, an episode that became known as Rathergate occurred.  “60 Minutes” tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents that put the service of President George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, way back in the early 1970s, in a bad light.  It was a complete fraud.  The documents were fakes.  And the fraud unraveled quickly, as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy forgeries that were full of substantive errors as well as the typographical errors that made most of the news.