RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-unanimous-knockout-on-media-rules-11617316109?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Local newspapers and broadcasters have struggled, or worse, as cable and social media become more dominant. But they received some good news Thursday as the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s rules letting local media consolidate to compete with bigger players.

The FCC has broad statutory power to regulate broadcast media “as public convenience, interest, or necessity requires.” In the 1960s and ’70s, the agency issued three rules limiting cross-ownership of newspapers, broadcast TV and radio. The intent was to prevent one company from dominating the local news market. This sounds silly today given the digital media dominance and cross-ownership of Big Tech. Nothing prevents Apple from owning news and podcast platforms.

Fortunately, as media markets evolved, Congress in 1996 directed the FCC to review its media ownership rules every four years and repeal or modify those that no longer serve the public interest. The FCC has made several attempts over two decades—most recently in 2017—yet each time has been blocked by Judges Thomas Ambro and Julio Fuentes on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The judges last ruled in 2019 that the FCC’s rule didn’t adequately consider harm to minority and female ownership.

But as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains for the Court in FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project, the Third Circuit decision was itself arbitrary and capricious. Despite soliciting public comment on minority and female ownership, the FCC “had received no countervailing evidence suggesting that changing the three ownership rules was likely to harm minority and female ownership.” He adds that the Administrative Procedure Act imposes “no general obligation on agencies to conduct or commission their own empirical or statistical studies.”

Justice Clarence Thomas points out in a concurrence that Congress didn’t require the FCC to consider minority and female ownership. The Third Circuit judges thus had no authority to require it to do so. Congress’s broad delegation to the FCC to regulate local media markets to promote whatever the agency views as the “public interest” deserves judicial scrutiny. But for now the 9-0 decision is an embarrassing rebuke to the plaintiffs and errant judges who couldn’t get a single Justice on their side.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/matt-taibbi-msnbc-joe-scarborough-russia-hoax

Taibbi accuses MSNBC of ‘suckage’ that ‘was visible from space during the key years of Russiagate’

Journalist Matt Taibbi took MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to task Monday after the “Morning Joe” host suggested that critics of the mainstream media’s Russian collusion narrative are on Vladimir Putin’s “payroll.” 

On Monday, Scarborough panned a statement sent out late Friday by former President Donald Trump that asked “Where’s Durham?” in reference to the ongoing into the origings of the Russia investigation by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham.

Scarborough then took aim at those who were critical of the media’s coverage of the unsubstantiated narrative, which was heavily led by MSNBC.

“I’m amused by so-called reporters who are- I don’t know if they’re useful idiots for Russia or if they’re on Russia’s payroll,” Scarborough began. “I don’t know and I don’t really care, but there are some gifted writers who spend all night and day trying to dig through, looking for instances of where the press screwed up on Russia stories, pushing this ‘Russian hoax’ fallacy.”

“It’s just- it’s a joke because if you look at the totality of it, if you look at the totality of everything that happened, the media screwed up at some points and sometimes they screwed up badly, but more often than not they got it right and they get most of it right,” the MSNBC host continued. 

Taibbi, a vocal critic of the media’s Russia coverage during the Trump years, fired back in a piece published on his Substack in which he challenged Scarborough to invite him on “Morning Joe” for a debate.

“Implying that anyone who didn’t buy into the moral panic on Russia was a traitor was a fairly constant theme in media and politics in the last four years, with NBC’s smear of Tulsi Gabbard as a ‘favorite’ of ‘Russia’s propaganda machine’ being one of the ethical low points of the era. Why should Joe Scarborough be above the same tactics?” Taibbi asked before invoking other journalists critical of the media, including Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, and Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/big-media-and-big-tech-collude-control-thought-joseph-hippolito/

Nothing exemplifies the corporate collusion to control thought better than an article in the New York Times’ opinion section.

Charlie Warzel, one of the Times’ opinion writers, argues that conventional critical-thinking skills become useless when confronting the massive amount of information available online. Instead, Warzel advocates simplifying the process by limiting internet browsing to one or two trusted sources — such as Google or Wikipedia — to evaluate quickly whether a subject warrants further research.

But FrontPage Magazine reported in “What if the ‘Conspiracy’ is Real?” that Google and Wikipedia manipulate information that contradicts their political agendas. Both did that to Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow who produced a documentary showing in detail how President Donald Trump’s opponents stole last year’s election on Joe Biden’s behalf.

Warzel describes an idea devised by Michael Caulfield, a professor whom Warzel interviewed. Caulfield distilled the findings of two other professors, Stanford’s Sam Wineburg and the University of Maryland’s Sarah McGrew, into a process he calls SIFT: Stop, Investigate (the source), Find (better coverage) and Trace (claims to their original context).

“The four steps are based on the premise that you often make a better decision with less information than you do with more,” Warzel wrote. “Also, spending 15 minutes to determine a single fact in order to decipher a tweet or a piece of news coming from a source you’ve never seen before will often leave you more confused than you were before.”

While Warzel discourages professional researchers from using SIFT, he believes it provides an essential advantage for the average information consumer, who can be overwhelmed when evaluating online claims from various parties.

“What is potentially revolutionary about SIFT is that it focuses on making quick judgments,” Warzel wrote. “A SIFT fact check can and should take just 30, 60, 90 seconds to evaluate a piece of content.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-attack-the-powerless?token=

The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers.

On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in “a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense.

In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined: “Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants are using to raise money online.

The USA Today reporters went far beyond merely reporting how this fundraising was being conducted. They went so far as to tattle to PayPal and other funding sites on two of those defendants, Joe Biggs and Dominic Pezzola, and then boasted of their success in having their accounts terminated:

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Biggs fundraiser was listed as having received $52,201. Pezzola had received $730. Biggs’ campaign disappeared from the site shortly after USA TODAY inquired about it….

Friday, a USA TODAY reporter donated to Pezzola’s fundraiser using Stripe. Stripe told USA TODAY it does not comment on individual users. A USA TODAY reporter was able to make a $1 donation to Pezzola’s fundraiser using Venmo, a payment app owned by PayPal. After being alerted by USA TODAY, Venmo removed the account. 

Soon a PayPal account took its place. PayPal caught that and removed it, too. 

Wow, what brave and intrepid journalistic work: speaking truth to power and standing up to major power centers by . . . working as little police officers for tech giants to prevent private citizens from being able to afford criminal lawyers. Clear the shelves for the imminent Pulitzer. Whatever you think about the Capitol riot, everyone has the right to a legal defense and to do what they can to ensure they have the best legal defense possible — especially when the full weight of the Justice Department is crashing down on your head even for non-violent offenses, which is what many of these defendants are charged with due to the politically charged nature of the investigation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/bidens-lie-filled-press-conference-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden’s March 25th press conference was his first since taking office. He lied so often during the hour or so he spoke and fielded questions that even the New York Times had to take notice.

“We’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming,” Biden claimed, referring to families of migrants illegally crossing or seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

“False,” declared the New York Times. “Federal officials recorded about 19,000 encounters with families at the southwestern border in February. Of those, about 7,900 families, or 42 percent, were expelled, far short of a majority.” The Times also cited an Axios report that the expulsion rate was 13 percent during the previous week.

Biden claimed that former President Donald Trump eliminated the funding for aid to the Central American countries that Biden had helped put together as the Obama administration’s vice president. The purpose of the aid, Biden said, was to get at the root causes of why migrants were leaving those countries. “What did Trump do? He eliminated that funding,” Biden said. “He didn’t use it.”

“False,” declared the New York Times again. “President Donald J.Trump did not completely eliminate the aid that Mr. Biden cited,” the New York Times explained. The Times’ fact-checker pointed out that aid to Central America was set by Congress at $505.9 million in the 2021 fiscal year (which began during Trump’s term) and that the aid that Trump temporarily suspended in April 2019 was restored in October 2019.

The New York Times also said that Biden had “exaggerated” when he claimed that Trump had “shut down the number of beds available.” Calling this an exaggeration was too kind. Biden was lying once again. The Times’ fact-checker noted that the monthly bed capacity grew to over 16,000 by December 2018, and that by Trump’s “last full month in office, in December 2020, monthly bed capacity was more than 13,000.” There were some reductions during the pandemic to comply with coronavirus protocols while Trump was in office – health precautions that the Biden administration is throwing to the wind as it tries to cope with the huge surge of illegal unaccompanied minors that its open border policy has invited.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/29/report-media-reported-only-bad-covid-news-until-trump-lost/

A study published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research finds that coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic by the domestic press was overwhelmingly negative. More negative than the international press. More negative than the local press. And more negative than the science. But then a funny thing happened after President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid.

Researchers at Dartmouth College and Brown University did a content analysis of tens of thousands of COVID-19 news stories to look at the levels of negativity. What they found was that 87% of the stories published by the top 15 news sources in the country were negative in tone. That compares with 50% of international news sources, and 64% for scientific journals. They also found the mainstream media were 25 percentage points more likely to be negative than more general U.S news sources.

What’s more, this overwhelming negativity included even “areas with positive developments, including school re-openings and vaccine trials.” And, the researchers determined, the mainstream media coverage was “unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases.”

In other words, the national press in the U.S. was putting a negative spin on everything COVID-related. (The study is titled “Why Is All COVID News Bad News?”)

Those 14 top news sources tracked by the researchers, by the way, included only two that might be considered conservative – Fox News and the New York Post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/media-suddenly-much-less-interested-guy-busted-w6-daniel-greenfield/

When this story first broke right after the Boulder supermarket shooting, the media thought it had a train full of narrative. But the Boulder shooter turned out to be a Syrian Muslim forcing the media to play defense while telling everyone not to pay attention to the identity of the shooter.
And the guy with all those guys in the Atlanta Publix? He doesn’t fit the narrative either.
A 22-year-old accused of taking six guns and body armor into a busy Atlanta grocery store will remain in jail after waiving his first appearance hearing Thursday.
Rico Abednego Neequaye Marley faces 11 felonies after authorities said he walked into the Atlantic Station Publix on Wednesday afternoon armed to the teeth. He was arrested after a shopper spotted him with a rifle in the men’s restroom about 1:30 p.m. and alerted the store’s employees, Atlanta police said.
According to an incident report, Instacart shopper Charles Russell entered the restroom and heard “clicking sounds” coming from a bathroom stall.
Marley has the expected record for a member of the Democrat base.
Jail records show Marley was arrested by Chamblee police on a simple assault charge in January 2018. He was arrested again four months later on a theft by receiving stolen property charge in DeKalb County, court records show.
Sorry guys, just an ordinary criminal. Not at all the Trump voter you were looking for. Better luck next time.

When this story first broke right after the Boulder supermarket shooting, the media thought it had a train full of narrative. But the Boulder shooter turned out to be a Syrian Muslim forcing the media to play defense while telling everyone not to pay attention to the identity of the shooter.

And the guy with all those guys in the Atlanta Publix? He doesn’t fit the narrative either.

A 22-year-old accused of taking six guns and body armor into a busy Atlanta grocery store will remain in jail after waiving his first appearance hearing Thursday.

Rico Abednego Neequaye Marley faces 11 felonies after authorities said he walked into the Atlantic Station Publix on Wednesday afternoon armed to the teeth. He was arrested after a shopper spotted him with a rifle in the men’s restroom about 1:30 p.m. and alerted the store’s employees, Atlanta police said.

According to an incident report, Instacart shopper Charles Russell entered the restroom and heard “clicking sounds” coming from a bathroom stall.

Marley has the expected record for a member of the Democrat base.

Jail records show Marley was arrested by Chamblee police on a simple assault charge in January 2018. He was arrested again four months later on a theft by receiving stolen property charge in DeKalb County, court records show. 

Sorry guys, just an ordinary criminal. Not at all the Trump voter you were looking for. Better luck next time.

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/26/usa-today-fired-diversity-editor-jumped-conclusions-identity-boulder-shooter/

When authorities in Boulder, Colorado named the supermarket shooter this week, there were a whole lot of people on the left who had egg on their face. That’s because many had wrongly assumed the shooter must be white. I wrote an entire post based on a Twitter thread just collecting some of the many blue checked lefties who made this mistake.

One of the most conspicuous people to make this error was Hemal Jhaveri. As Dave Rubin pointed out she had tweeted this about the shooting: “It’s always an angry white man. Always.” Only in this case, it wasn’t.

Jhaveri isn’t just some rando leftie on Twitter. She was the Diversity and Inclusion editor at USA Today Sports. Today Jhaveri wrote a piece on Medium explaining she was fired shortly afterwards.

On Monday night, I sent a tweet responding to the fact that mass shooters are most likely to be white men. It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online. It was a careless error of judgement, sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it. I apologized and deleted the tweet.

By Tuesday morning, after the shooter was identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, several high profile alt-right Twitter accounts picked up the tweet as an example of anti-white bias and racism against whites…

There was social media outrage, threats and harassment towards me, and by the end of the day, USA TODAY had relieved me of my position as a Race and Inclusion editor.

Was her firing reasonable? To be honest, I’m not sure. On the one hand I’m against canceling people over tweets, especially old tweets someone put up when they were a dumb teenager.

On the other hand, I do think there are times when someone’s tweets are not compatible with their job. For instance, I think the SF School Board made the right call to strip Alison Collins of her leadership position based on her tweets about Asians. Collins hasn’t really apologized and hasn’t deleted the tweets. She clearly still believes Asians use “white supremacist thinking” to “get ahead.” And that’s just not a tenable position to hold if you are part of a district that is 30% Asian people.