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The New York Times’s “Anonymous” is an insignificant pipsqueak By Andrea Widburg

By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/the_new_york_timess_anonymous_is_an_insignificant_pipsqueak.html

In 2018, the New York Times proudly published an anonymously written piece from a purported “senior official in the Trump administration,” knowing that this statement was a lie. “Anonymous” claimed that Trump was an idiot, but that a brave band of “senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda.” In fact, the author was Miles Taylor, a low-level functionary in DHS when he wrote the hit piece.

The anonymous article, published on Sept. 5, 2018, bore the lofty title, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration: I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” As noted above, to give the piece heft, the New York Times claimed it came from a “senior official in the Trump administration.” We now know this statement was an outright lie, for the Times admitted that the author’s “identity is known to us.”

The article was a nauseating glue of arrogant piety and self-serving condescension. On the one hand, “Anonymous” insisted that he and others like him “want the administration to succeed,” and even agreed that “many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.” Nevertheless, his brave little band of saboteurs loathed Trump and, no matter how effective he was, they were going to thwart him. It was paragraph after paragraph of smug, self-righteous glop.

In the two years since the article appeared, there’s been lots of speculation about who wrote it. CNN’s Chris Cillizza even wrote a lengthy piece on the subject, putting forward such people as then-Chief of Staff John Kelly, White House counsel Don McGahn, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and even Mike Pence and Melania Trump. Media hacks love to gossip. They still do. They can’t be bothered to investigate Joe Biden’s dirty dealings with the Chinese, but they’ll spend weeks canoodling with each other playing gossip guessing games.

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New York Times Editors Want to Send $5 Billion More to Iran. Here Are Nine Reasons They’re Wrong. by Ira Stoll

By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/10/28/new-york-times-editors-want-to-send-5-bil

The New York Times is seizing on the coronavirus pandemic to push the idea of easing American economic sanctions on Iran, notwithstanding Iranian interference in American elections.

A staff editorial the Times published earlier this month was headlined, “Iran’s Covid-19 Death Toll Is Rising. Show Mercy, Mr. Trump.” It argued for relaxing the sanctions against Iran, calling them “particularly cruel during a pandemic.” The Times followed up days later by publishing an opinion piece describing Iranians as “crushed” by “extreme US sanctions.” And by publishing a follow-up editorial inaccurately claiming “Sanctions against Iran are opposed by allies and threaten a humanitarian disaster.”

Here are nine reasons the Times editorial line is misguided:

It relies on a discredited expert. The Times editorial says: “Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, calls the American ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran ‘sadism masquerading as foreign policy.’” Slavin had to apologize in 2017 after being photographed making an obscene gesture to protesters against the Iranian regime. Back in January 2020, Slavin wrote a Times op-ed headlined “Qassim Suleimani’s Killing Will Unleash Chaos.” The chaos she predicted failed to materialize. The Times fails to mention that the Atlantic Council’s funders include foreign governments and foreign individuals, oil companies, a nuclear power company and undisclosed “anonymous” donors, some of which may want to do business in Iran or have commercial interests affected by the sanctions. The line about “sadism masquerading as foreign policy” is clever, but sending money to an enemy country, as the advocates of eased sanctions want to do, is masochism masquerading as foreign policy.

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Twitter, Facebook Confess There Is No Evidence Of Russian Disinformation Behind Hunter Biden Story  By Jordan Davidson

By on October 28th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/28/twitter-facebook-confess-there-is-no-evidence-of-russian-disinformation-behind-hunter-biden-story/

n Wednesday’s Senate hearing on Big Tech and Section 230, both Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that neither had any evidence that the New York Post’s reporting on Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals is Russian disinformation.

“For both Mr. Zuckerberg and Dorsey who censored the New York Post stories or throttle them back, do you have any evidence that the New York Post story is part of Russian disinformation or that those emails are not authentic?” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin asked. “Do you have any information whatsoever they are not authentic or they are Russian disinformation?

Dorsey and Zuckerberg both denied receiving any indication that the story was part of a Russian misinformation campaign.

Within days of the story’s censorship, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe explicitly debunked the disinformation claims made by Rep. Adam Schiff, when he reported the intelligence community has no evidence that the bombshell story was a foreign attempt to spread misinformation and interfere in the U.S. election.

“Let me be clear,” he said on Fox News, “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that.”

“We have shared no intelligence with Chairman Schiff, or any other member of Congress that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe clarified. “It’s simply not true.”

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Peter Beinart’s assault on the Abraham Accords By Ruthie Blum

By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/peter-beinarts-assault-on-the-abraham-accords/

 Peter Beinart’s latest attack on the Jewish state that he opposes as vehemently as he professes to have its best interest at heart is a work of remarkable sophistry.

In a lengthy op-ed on Monday in the radical-leftist quarterly Jewish Currents, the author of The Crisis of Zionism—recently hired by the equally ill-intentioned New York Times as a “contributing opinion writer”—bashes Israel by denigrating the Muslim-majority countries with which it is forging warm peace treaties.

That the Abraham Accords and Sudan agreement were brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump made them even more treif in the eyes of the kosher-keeping New York Jew, who boasts of attending an Orthodox synagogue and of feeling a “spiritual connection to Jewish people.”

The piece in question—“Israel’s Repressive Diplomacy”—delves into the Israel-United Arab Emirates and Israel-Bahrain deals signed at the White House on Sept. 15, and Sudan’s pledge on Friday to jump on the bandwagon. In it, Beinart attempts to refute the joint assertion by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that these developments will promote “human dignity and freedom” in the Middle East.

He begins by going after the regime in Abu Dhabi, citing a report in the Middle East Monitor stating that “scores of Emiratis, Palestinians and Jordanians living in the UAE have already been imprisoned “for opposing Abu-Dhabi’s peace deal with Israel.”

One example he gives is that of Emirati poet Dhabiya Khamis, who recounted on social media that she was prevented from boarding a Cairo-bound flight from the Dubai International Airport “probably because of my announced opinion against Zionism and normalization.”

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Lesley Stahl Is Wrong And Trump Is Right: The Obama Administration Spied On The Trump Campaign By Margot Cleveland

By on October 27th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/26/lesley-stahl-is-wrong-and-trump-is-right-the-obama-administration-spied-on-the-trump-campaign/

‘60 Minutes’ and Lesley Stahl falsely reported it is ‘unverified’ that the Obama-Biden administration spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Last week, President Trump’s team released 38 minutes of unedited video capturing his contentious sit-down with Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes.” Sunday evening, CBS broadcast clips of the interview and amazingly let air proof of Trump’s charge that the media is fake news: “60 Minutes” and Stahl falsely reported that it is “unverified” that the Obama-Biden administration spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Trump and not Stahl raised this scandal, as the unedited video showed, after he reversed roles with his interviewer and pushed her to say whether she thought it was okay for Hunter Biden to give “the big guy” a 10 percent cut of money raised by Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden’s son in China, and whether it was okay for China to give the Biden family one and a half billion dollars to manage and for Joe to then negotiate with China on behalf of Americans.

“60 Minutes” edited out those details of the Biden scandal, but let the television audience hear Trump say of it, “It’s the biggest scan…” before correcting himself, “the second biggest scandal. The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign.”

The next minutes continued with what would be a comic routine of “did not,” “did too,” did not,” if the subject wasn’t truly the biggest scandal in American political history.

“They spied on my campaign,” Trump repeated.

“But there’s no evide…real evidence of that,” Leslie countered.

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The Dirty Deals of NPR Decades of gross bias and disinformation. Joseph Klein

By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/its-time-defund-npr-joseph-klein/

National Public Radio (NPR) does not serve the American taxpayers who are paying its bills. Most recently, NPR did its part to shield Joe Biden from the fallout of the Biden family pay-for-access corruption scheme. That’s nothing new. NPR has long served as the leftwing progressive Democrat Party’s propaganda arm. Back in 2016, for example, NPR shilled for the disastrous nuclear deal pushed by the Obama administration, after receiving funding from a pro-nuclear deal advocacy group. It is long past time to end the gravy train and defund NPR.

On October 22nd, NPR’s public editor rationalized NPR’s decision to suppress coverage of the New York Post’s expose of the Hunter Biden e-mails implicating Joe Biden himself in his son’s business dealings. NPR’s managing editor Terence Samuel tweeted: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” 

The Media Research Center retorted: “How exactly is doing what is supposed to be your job of reporting and investigating a story with credible sources to be a ‘waste of time?’

David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, tried to kill the messenger that broke the story on the e-mails which were reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. Folkenflik attacked the New York Post as “suspect” and speculated “whether those emails were somehow hacked and doctored, or completely fabricated.” Folkenflik repeated the baseless claim, debunked by the FBI and Director of National Intelligence, that the New York Post story may have been part of Russia’s disinformation campaign.

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Piers Morgan slams CNN for cancelling his interview after he criticized them for not covering the Hunter Biden story because they fear ‘they might lose the Democrats the election’ if they did

By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8873037/Piers-Morgan-slams-journalists-hyper-partisan-failing-cover-Hunter-Biden-STORY.html

Piers Morgan slammed CNN for cancelling his upcoming book promoting appearance on Reliable Sources this Sunday 
It came after he called US journalists ‘hyper-partisan’ during an appearance on Fox & Friends on Friday morning
He said the media is playing partisan politics by failing to cover a story about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden with damning emails and photos   
Morgan told DailyMail.com that CNN was willing to interview him when he wrote negative Trump columns but not more positive ones
He added that he believes liberal networks have not investigated the Hunter Biden story because it could lead to Democrats losing the presidential election 

Piers Morgan has slammed CNN for canceling his interview with the network after he said they and other American news outlets were being biased for not covering a story about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. 

During an appearance on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, Morgan was played clips of journalists, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, dismissing the allegations as false.

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Media Firemen Scramble to Save Biden Candidacy By Jack Cashill

By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/media_firemen_scramble_to_save_biden_candidacy.html

Watching the media scramble these last two weeks to save Joe Biden’s candidacy, I am reminded of a scene in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian sci-fi classic, Fahrenheit 451, 451 degrees Fahrenheit being the temperature at which paper burns.

In the novel, the state employs “firemen” to burn paper lest the few civilians who care about books avail themselves of information the state does not want them to have. During the Biden stretch run, the firemen on the left have shredded what is left of their reputations as journalists to destroy information the Deep State does not want their audiences to have.

Even before Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced, the media busied themselves suppressing information that was readily available to the ordinary citizen — montages of Biden plagiarizing, groping little girls, making racially insensitive comments, eulogizing exalted KKK cyclops, threatening Ukrainian prosecutors, even sexually assaulting at least one very credible Democrat — and they did so with enough success that the Biden camp felt comfortable positioning Joe as the candidate with “character.”

The Hunter laptop was too tangible to dispose of subtly. Not since Joseph Goebbels urged the German Student Union “to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past” has a western nation so flagrantly thrown in on the side of ignorance. Twitter has gotten most of the attention for its total blocking of the New York Post, which broke the laptop story, but the firemen at NPR were not far behind.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told his audience in the way of answering a reader question. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was… a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.” NPR’s public editor added that, in any case, “the assertions don’t amount to much.”

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Why Would Media Frighten People About a Virus? – Of course, they wouldn’t be media if they didn’t !! Donald Devine

By on October 27th, 2020

http://Why Would Media Frighten People About a Virus? – Of course, they wouldn’t be media if they didn’t !! Donald Devine

Every morning we are greeted by blaring headline news telling us how many more of our neighbors have been infected by the “life-threatening” coronavirus, with the total now nearing eight million stricken Americans.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was typical. “Everyone should be afraid of COVID.”

Blitzer was reacting to President Donald Trump’s statement upon leaving the hospital after testing positive for the virus. “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

Didn’t he know he was supposed to be frightened? This expectation is more than the normal kneejerk media overreaction to Trump. It goes to the fundamentals of how the media and intellectuals generally exercise their control over most politicians and the public.

As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put it: “People see the numbers going up. Close everything! Close everything! It’s not the best way to do it but it is a fear-driven response. The virus scares people.… The fear is too high to do anything other than: let’s do everything we can to get the infection rate down now. Close the doors. Close the windows. That’s where we are.”

For a person in his mid-seventies as is the President, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics (ages 75-84) report that between February 1 and October 3 of this year, 52,618 seniors have died from Covid-19. But 519,488 of that age group have died from all causes during that period. That means coronavirus represented merely 10 percent of fatalities even for the more susceptible elderly.

Still the numbers are scary. Yet old people like me do get sick and die more than younger ones.

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Christiane Amanpour Gives The Game Away On Media Blackout Of Biden Scandal

By on October 26th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/26/christiane-amanpour-gives-the-game-away-on-media-blackout-of-biden-scandal/

Anyone who is still clinging to the notion that the mainstream press isn’t a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party needs to watch the exchange between premier journalist Christiane Amanpour and Republican National Committee spokeswoman Liz Harrington.

As the troubling Hunter Biden story has developed, the press’ reasons for not covering it shifted. At first, the media said they wouldn’t cover it because the veracity of the laptop and the smoking gun emails hadn’t been “verified” and speculated that it was all part of another Russian effort to get Trump elected.

After the authenticity of the laptop and at least some of the most damaging emails and texts were shown to be legitimate, and after the attempt to portray it as a Russian hoax was demolished, the press decided that it wasn’t a big enough scandal to warrant coverage, that it was just “a distraction.”

Asked about NPR’s lack of coverage of the scandal, for example, NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel, said that “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

(Websters should add this definition to “distraction” – n: in media parlance, a scandal that involves a Democratic politician.)

National Review had it almost right when it said in an editorial that “Too many journalists seem to live in terror of being blamed for reporting stories that might influence voters to reelect Donald Trump.”

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