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MEDIA

Trump’s legal team made its open argument to the public By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/trumps_legal_team_made_its_open_argument_to_the_public.html

“Trump will have to work do whatever he can to make his case to the American people because the media are going to do whatever they can to destroy him.”

Shortly after noon Eastern Time, some Trump legal team members assembled for a press conference to bring the media up to speed about what Trump’s team believes it can prove in terms of election fraud. For regular American Thinker readers, much of what they said was old news. For the media, though, it was new information, and they were not happy.

Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were the main speakers, with Jenna Ellis having a small backup role. Giuliani discussed the non-computer related shenanigans in the various jurisdictions. He asserted that the Trump team had collected hundreds of affidavits attesting to old-fashioned vote stealing. He talked about illegal ballots, which primarily came in via the mail, faked vote counts, and illegal efforts to prevent Republicans from observing the counts.

Giuliani declined to make all but one of the affidavits available to the assembled reporters. His reason was simple: He knew that the media would immediately begin to harass the ordinary citizens who put their reputations on the line to attest to fraud. After the various cases go to court, there’ll be time enough for the reporters to stalk witnesses.

Fox News continues to alienate its viewers By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/fox_news_continues_to_alienate_its_viewers.html

Fox News continues to insult its audience. This time, the insults came from Kristin Fisher, who was speaking from either ignorance or malice when she attacked Rudy Giuliani after Trump’s legal team gave a press conference.

The press conference was the equivalent of an opening argument in a trial. Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis each stated one aspect of the upcoming case: Giuliani described on-the-ground voter fraud, Powell described a sophisticated computer system created in Venezuela to steal votes, and Ellis reminded people that this was an opening argument rather than an evidentiary hearing. The evidence, she said, will come.

The conference was essentially a preview of coming attractions. In a trial, first you tell your story, then you prove your story, and then you summarize your story. The legal team is at Phase One.

That didn’t stop Kristin Fisher from proving that she’s a lousy listener and is staggeringly ignorant about how the American legal system works. Following the press conference, Fisher went after Giuliani like a rabid dog:

“Well that was certainly a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani but it was light on facts,” Fisher said after the press conference. “So much of what he said was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court, and Giuliani, he opened by making this really bold and baseless claim that a lot of this alleged nationwide voter fraud that he is referring to all came from one centralized place.”

Ruthie Blum:The ill-deserved reprieves of Christiane Amanpour and Jeremy Corbyn

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/christiane-amanpour-jeremy-corbyns-ill-deserved-reprieves-opinion-649641

CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour and Britain’s former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were given undeserved reprieves this week for behavior that should have sent them both packing for good.

Amanpour, whose unfettered leftist and anti-Israel slant has brought her decades of fame and fortune, managed on Monday to extinguish a fire of criticism that was coming at her from directions she hadn’t anticipated. The only effort it required was to issue what every media outlet in the world reported as an “apology” for the comments that elicited the brouhaha.

It was a neat trick, as remorse for her egregious sentiment – that US President Donald Trump is as dangerous as Adolf Hitler – was nowhere to be found in the clarification of her words about Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria in November 1938.

“This week 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened,” Amanpour had said in her monologue last Friday. “It was the Nazis’ warning shot across the bow of our human civilization that led to genocide against a whole identity, and in that tower of burning books, it led to an attack on fact, knowledge, history and truth. After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to norms, including the truth.”

Jews and non-Jews alike were appalled at Amanpour’s analogy. The Endowment for Middle East Truth also pointed to her having referred to the Holocaust as “genocide against a whole identity,” rather than the targeted annihilation of Jews.

About Those Trump Vaccine Predictions Do media “fact checkers” owe the President an apology? By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-trump-vaccine-predictions-11605738468?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“Public-private partnership” is usually a Beltway term for cronyism and the waste of taxpayer resources. But so far it’s hard to argue with the results of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed to assist the development and distribution of medical innovations to address Covid-19. The rapid results must be especially striking to news consumers who were repeatedly told that the president was wrong in predicting quick development of a vaccine.

Back in August, Jane C. Timm and Jane Weaver of NBC News reported on the President’s Republican convention speech:

Fact check: No evidence for Trump’s COVID-19 vaccine claim
“In recent months, our nation, and the entire planet, has been struck by a new and powerful invisible enemy. Like those brave Americans before us, we are meeting this challenge. We are delivering lifesaving therapies, and will produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner!” Trump claimed on Thursday night.
This is largely false… The president boasts of lifesaving therapies, but critics argue there isn’t enough evidence to back up this claim… There is also no evidence that an effective vaccine will be delivered by the end of the year.

Thank goodness these “fact checkers” didn’t have a firm grasp of the facts. The Journal’s Jared Hopkins reports today:

Pfizer Inc. said Wednesday it will ask health regulators to authorize its experimental Covid-19 vaccine within days, after reporting the shot was 95% effective in its pivotal study and showing signs of being safe.
The company’s plans mean the shot is on track to go into distribution by the end of the year, if the regulators permit.

Democrats And The Media Keep Lying About Obama’s Agencies Spying On Trump’s Campaign By Eric Felten

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/18/democrats-and-the-media-keep-lying-about-obamas-agencies-spying-on-trumps-campaign/

Proving whether election irregularities occurred will require a willingness to judge the evidence fairly, not a habit of declaring demonstrable facts to have been ‘debunked.’

Four years after the FBI sent “Confidential Human Sources” secretly to gather information on Donald Trump’s team, the president’s opponents in politics and the media continue to deny that the bureau spied on his 2016 campaign. They are now using that denial to dismiss questions of voting irregularities in the 2020 election by arguing that Trump and his allies traffic in outrageous falsehoods for partisan purposes.

During the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence said, “When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, the FBI actually spied on President Trump and my campaign.” The response from NBC “fact checkers” was to declare that “Pence repeated a false claim that Trump made during the first presidential debate – accusing the Obama administration of spying on their 2016 campaign.”

Media Are Denying the Facts

At Politico, Kyle Cheney and Andrew Desiderio caricatured the accusation of spying as alleging “Biden was a mastermind of an effort to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign,” saying it was a story “riddled with falsehoods, exaggerations and assumptions.” By pressing accusations of spying, the president has politicized “institutions in a way that will leave lasting damage,” Politico quoted Democrats saying. The outlet warned, “Trump may exacerbate that strain in the coming weeks.”

The Transformation of Fox News Gradually turning into a mirror image of CNN? Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/fox-and-friends-lloyd-billingsley/

“We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” boasted Joe Biden back in October. The inclusive, extensive voter fraud was much in evidence on November 3, particularly in crucial swing states. The following Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany accused Democrats of welcoming fraud and illegal voting.

“You don’t take these positions because you want an honest election,” McEnany said. That got a rise out of Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto.

“Unless she has more details to back that up,” Cavuto told viewers, “I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this,” and he duly cut away. Fox anchors used to say, “we report, you decide,” but that was all over now, replaced by a different dynamic.

On election night Fox made bad calls while voters were still going to the polls, and any second thoughts were hard to find. Fox’s zeal to make the call for the addled Joe Biden surpassed any instinct to investigate the voter fraud Biden openly celebrated. This is a network supposedly “fair, balanced and unafraid,” and if viewers doubt that slogan it would be hard to blame them. Take, for example, the presidential debate.

Fox’s Chris Wallace recycled a discredited Trump tax story and failed to ask Joe Biden why, like other prominent Democrats, he had requested to unmask Gen. Flynn in January of 2017. Unlike the tax story, that is an undisputed matter of fact. In effect, Wallace was Biden’s debate partner, and he was also on board with the Russia hoax. When Nancy Pelosi called the vote for impeachment, Wallace proclaimed, “I have to say I can feel goosebumps.”

With the possible exceptions of Jeff Zucker or Brian Stelter, Chris Wallace could be the least telegenic man on cable. Chris is the son of Mike Wallace, a big star of CBS News, and without daddy, one doubts that son Chris would have landed jobs at NBC, ABC, and Fox, which was thrilled to have him.

Like Chris, everybody at Fox News now wants to be like Mike, and the Fox news division shows little distinction from CBS and the rest of the Democrat-media axis. Fox News could easily have set itself apart by covering stories the other networks missed or refused to cover, like the one that broke in May of 2017.

In Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, presidential biographer David Garrow wrote that Dreams from My Father was not an autobiography or memoir. It was “without any question” a novel, and the author a “composite character.” That is, as they say, a Big Story, but Fox did not dispatch reporters to get a response from the composite character president formerly known as Barry Soetoro.

Likewise, Fox’s allegedly “unafraid” reporters failed to seek out any of the luminaries who hailed Dreams from My Father as an authentic autobiography and memoir. Any Fox reporter could have cross-checked the Barack Obama archive at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. As the archive confirms, in all his writing from 1958 to 1964, Barack Obama mentioned nothing about a white American wife and Hawaiian-born son. No such investigation took place on any network, and another Big Story broke in 2018.

Chris Hayes, Jeff Goldberg Smear Madison Cawthorn Using Fake Quote By Tobias Hoonhout

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/chris-hayes-jeff-goldberg-smear-madison-cawthorn-using-fake-quote/

OH PULEEZ! SPARE ME THE SELECTIVE OUTRAGE FROM PUNDITS WHO GIVE REAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN ACADEMIA AND DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS BUT FOCUS ON AN EVANGELIST REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN….RSK

Soon-to-be the youngest member of Congress, North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn has already faced a media onslaught that dishonestly cast a 2017 Instagram post, which showed his visit to Adolf Hitler’s World War II retreat, as neo-Nazi propaganda. Members of the elite press rekindled their misguided outrage on Monday in response to a quote that was falsely attributed to Cawthorn.

In a wide-ranging interview with Jewish Insider, Cawthorn admitted that “it does not look like Donald Trump is going to be the president,” described sharing common ground with Joe Biden on “infrastructure reform,” and expressed an interest in reforming America’s “terrible” foreign policy. He also said he was “looking forward” to meeting Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) — whom he described as someone “of conviction.”

For the mainstream press, however, the major takeaway was Cawthorn’s comment about his religious convictions.

“Newly Elected GOP Congressman Madison Cawthorn Has Tried to Convert Jews to Christianity” reads a fear-mongering headline in the Daily Beast.

Social Media Censorship Sows the Wind, and We All Reap the Whirlwind By Daniel Gelernter

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/16/social-media-censorship-sows-the-wind-and-we-all-reap-the-whirlwind/

Google, Facebook, and Twitter wanted to make a happier world in which we weren’t troubled by wrong information or misleading ideas. Instead they have led America to the brink of genuine catastrophe.

My first encounter with social media fact-checking was over a year ago, when Facebook appended a “false information” tag to a meme I had posted about World War II, of all things. An article by PolitiFact, to which Facebook directed everyone who saw this meme, informed us that careful research had proved that gun control did not, in fact, help advance the Holocaust, and so it was not fair to use the Holocaust as an argument against gun control in America.

One problem with this article is the touchingly naïve idea that a complex question, over which historians continue to argue, could be stamped true or false as though it were a fact you’d simply been too lazy to look up. 

A second problem is that this fact-checking article is full of factual errors. But that’s not surprising when such articles are generally written by a twentysomething journalism school graduate who became an “expert” in World War II that afternoon after her supervisor told her to research a meme on the Internet.

The biggest problem, however, was that Facebook had decided that this question—remote and unimportant as it might be in our daily lives—was not something you should be allowed to think about. If you thought about it yourself, unguided, as though you were, say, an adult and not a schoolchild, you might come to the wrong conclusion. And lest you be misled into thinking there was a connection between gun control and tyranny, Facebook had looked into the matter for you. And don’t worry, they found there wasn’t any connection, so you can rest easy and move on to the fluffy kitten pictures.

Christiane Amanpour is no journalist By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/christiane_amanpour_is_no_journalist.html

CNN international anchor Christiane Amanpour used the Nazi Holocaust against Jews to once again misportray and besmirch the reputation of President Donald Trump and the 72 million people who voted for him.

Amanpour stated: “This week 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened.  It was the Nazis’ warning shot across the bow of our human civilization that led to genocide against a whole identity and, in that tower of burning books, it led to an attack on fact, knowledge, history and proof. After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to normal.”

Like many on the left, Amanpour is blatantly insensitive to the brutality against and extermination of Europe’s Jews and exploits this historical genocide as a means to vilify conservatives and Trump-supporters.  It is an evil tactic reflecting a cruel and fraudulent personality.

The very fact that she has been able for four years to freely level obscene lies against the president without any retaliation against her from President Trump indicates that Trump is in no way stifling her freedom of speech.  What she should be concerned about is the censorship, cancel culture, political correctness, and destruction of people’s reputations and livelihoods coming from the left-wing precincts and much of the Biden-Clinton-Obama-Squad Democrat apparatus she extols.  Amanpour speaks of Kristallnacht and yet remains silent while Antifa physically beats up regular Americans.  She praises Black Lives Matter, which, similar to what occurred on Kristallnacht, breaks the glass windows of stores owned by Americans and torches the streets of American commercial and residential neighborhoods.

Christopher Bedford: The Media Are Covering Up Left-Wing Violence Because They Agree With The Mission  

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/christopher-bedford-the-media-are-covering-up-left-wing-violence-because-they-agree-with-the-mission/

Federalist Senior Editor Christopher Bedford condemned the media’s deliberate attempts to either ignore or justify the left’s explosion of violence in the nation’s capital over the weekend as a symptom of press bias fomenting the chaos.

“The media absolutely ought to be covering it more, but they’re covering up more in a lot of cases because they agree with the mission and they think that they’re part of the Resistance as well,” Bedford said on Fox News Monday. “They think that Republicans or conservatives or people who are marching in the street are bad, basically right-arm-bearing Nazis, and at that point you can really justify a huge amount of action.”

Black Lives Matter and Antifa, Bedford added, imagine themselves as righteous activists operating under the curtain of historic struggles from fighting Nazism to the mid-20th century civil rights movement.

“What level wouldn’t you go to to try to stop Hitler,” Bedford said. “If you call your opponents Hitler, it can justify a lot of action … both of them are just setting up camps in Washington D.C. Downtown’s an absolute mess.”