RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/17/new-york-times-manipulates-fbi-lawyers-guilty-plea-to-hide-real-spygate-news/

A New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax was tasked with framing the news that a former top FBI lawyer was to plead guilty to deliberately fabricating evidence against a Donald Trump campaign affiliate targeted in the Russia probe. The resulting article is a case study in how to write propaganda.

Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page.

His job was to present the news as something other than an indictment of the FBI’s handling of the Russia collusion hoax, to signal to other media that they should move on from the story as quickly as possible, and to hide his own newspaper’s multi-year participation in the Russia collusion hoax. One intelligence source described it as an “insult” to his intelligence and “beyond Pravda,” a reference to the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Here’s how Goldman did it.

Mild Headline With Ludicrous Spin

The New York Times used to put every Russia collusion story it had on the front page. Then, when the narrative fell apart, the Times moved on to a new narrative of redefining America as irredeemably racist.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/untangling-the-media-myths-of-covid-19-11597099357?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Has there been in recent history a more tendentious, hysterical, data-denying and frankly disreputable exercise in misdirection than the way in which much of America’s media has covered the Covid-19 epidemic?

Perhaps we can forgive them the endless repetition of pandemic porn; the selectively culled stories of tragedy about otherwise completely healthy young people succumbing to the virus. While we know that the chances of someone under 30 being killed by Covid are very slim, we know too that news judgments have always favored the exceptional and horrific over the routine and unremarkable.

Perhaps we can even forgive them the rapidly shifting headlines—each one shouting with absolute certitude—about the basic facts of the virus and its context: its lethality and transmissibility, the merits of mask-wearing, or the effectiveness of this or that therapy. The science is evolving, and so too is the reporting.

But there are larger representations of this massive and complex story that we should mark as simply unforgivable.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/teen_vogue_calls_for_the_abolishment_of_private_property_capitalism.html

Teen Vogue recently published an op-ed by columnist Kandist Mallett in which she declared that no one should have the right to own property. She called for the elimination of landlords while averring that “an eviction crisis is coming” due to the coronavirus pandemic’s heavy toll on the United States, which, she says, is evidence of “the failures of capitalism.”

Mallett noted that “The pandemic didn’t create this housing crisis, but it did further expose the cruelty of payment-based housing.” No, but she herself may have just exposed the futility of payment-based higher education.

She rambled on: “Instead of seeing housing as a right and something that should not be commodified, the state enlists its own armed forces—sheriffs and police—to remove occupants from residences if they cannot pay rent. The lack of protections for non-landowners should be to no surprise from a country founded on the genocide and colonization of indigenous peoples.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-8-4-mainstream-media-polls-yet-m

“Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning are Approaching Zero” (Washington Post)

“Donald Trump is approaching his last chance to turn a catastrophic campaign into an ordinarily unsuccessful campaign” (The Atlantic)

“Now Trump is trailing in an average of post-convention poll results for every swing state from the past two cycles…” (Vox)

“Two much-discussed polls by The Times and Siena College that were published last week suggested that in key swing states, as well as nationally, [Trump’s] the limping dead” (New York Times)

“Trump is going to lose – decisively – this fall.” (San Diego Tribune)

“Trump Is Losing Big to [Opponent] in Voter Polls. Here’s How That Will Likely Play Out on Election Day” (MarketWatch) 

“Donald Trump’s Terrible Campaign is Finally Catching Up to Him” (Vanity Fair)

“Trump’s Losing, So When Are Republican Candidates Going to Abandon Him?” (New Yorker)

Some of these quotes are from 2016 and some are from 2020, but it’s almost impossible to tell which are which (Go ahead and guess in the comments, but it’s cheating if you click on the links). 

If you read the mainstream media, you would find it hard to believe that Trump has any chance of winning re-election in November. But then again, they had me utterly persuaded the same was true in 2016.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/0/04/investigative_issues_the_troubling_fact_that_media_fact-checkers_lean_left_124663.html

A growing response to today’s chaotic information landscape sounds inviting and elegantly simple: appoint experts to “fact-check” news stories, blogs, speeches, studies, opinions, and political ads. Information they deem to be false is corrected or even removed from public view, in the name of the public good.

Since Donald Trump’s election these “fact-checkers” have gained increased prominence. Pressure has mounted for news outfits and big tech companies – including Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to police political discourse. At the same time, many people, notably conservatives, are demanding that the tech giants back off such perceived censorship. Tensions on both sides were on display last week as a House Judiciary subcommittee grilled top Silicon Valley executives. 

That discord is likely to persist because in large part the fact-checking solution is illusory. Many such efforts fail because they amount to a circular feedback loop of verification. The fact-checkers are like-minded journalists or often liberal Silicon Valley gatekeepers, who frequently rely on partisan news sources and political activists to control narratives on a wide variety of issues and controversies. This small group of players exerts an oversized influence, using fact checks to shape and censor information.

Twitter recently sparked controversy by taking the unprecedented step of adding a disapproving “fact-checking label” to some of President Trump’s tweets. The social media site publicly explained that Trump’s May 26 posts contained what its fact-checkers deemed to be “potentially misleading information about voting processes.”

Trump had said widespread mail-in ballots in the 2020 election would be “substantially fraudulent.” While the definition of “substantially” is in the eye of the beholder, the United States, in fact, has a long and ongoing history of ballot fraud.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/03/media-silent-as-christopher-steele-hero-spymaster-narrative-crumbles/

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier. That didn’t stop corporate media.

It turns out Christopher Steele wasn’t 007.

For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. It wasn’t true.

Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/us-media-purge/

 The American Left is intensely frustrated by President Donald Trump’s ability to penetrate their monopoly on the news cycle. When the Left is frustrated, it acts out, up to and past the point of violence. A powerful weapon at its disposal is its ability to silence its perceived enemies. Much of the mainstream US media, cowed by the Left, reflexively capitulates to its demands to “cancel” individuals who express opinions that go against Leftist orthodoxy.

In the wake of the riots and destruction that coursed across the US after the killing of George Floyd, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was left with no choice but to resign after allowing the paper to publish an op-ed by US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas). Cotton argued in his piece that the military should be mobilized to restore order, and the airing of such a view is now verboten in the pages of the Times. Similarly, Stan Wischnowski, long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was pushed out of his job for daring to print a piece with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too.”

Both were victims not of careful reviews conducted by their papers but of the demands of the mob, which is now in control of the American newsroom. Along the same lines of this trend, Twitter made the executive decision to begin “curating” President Trump’s tweets.

To an extent, these events are simply eruptions coming from a large group of individuals who have not been educated in the norms of liberal democracy, but there is more to it than that. The demand to shame and ultimately silence perceived political opponents reflects the Left’s deep frustration that it has lost its monopoly on the news and is unable to beat Trump at its own game.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-producer-ariana-pekary-letter

A former MSNBC producer wrote a scathing open letter explaining why she recently left the cable news network.

“July 24th was my last day at MSNBC. I don’t know what I’m going to do next exactly but I simply couldn’t stay there anymore,” Ariana Pekary wrote on her personal website. “My colleagues are very smart people with good intentions. The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.”

Pekary provided a number of examples of why she wanted to leave the cable news network.

“It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate.’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day,” Pekary said. “Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.”

She then quoted someone she described a “successful and insightful TV veteran” who said: “We are a cancer and there is no cure… But if you could find a cure, it would change the world.”