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MEDIA

Amid a pandemic, the woke-ist media are experiencing a psychotic break by Becket Adams

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/amid-a-pandemic-the-woke-ist-media-are-experiencing-a-psychotic-break

If the press suffered a nervous breakdown after the 2016 election ⁠— and they did ⁠— they are experiencing a full-on psychotic break amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests.

It is as if the lockdowns and nationwide demonstrations caused media executives to snap, leaving them in a wide-eyed, obsessive frenzy to cleanse society of all problematics, screaming all the while, “Out, damned spot!”

CNN, for example, engaged in explicit political activism this week when it sought to shame companies that have yet to pull ads from Facebook over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s persistent refusal to censor problematic speech.

“These are the big brands that haven’t pulled ads from Facebook yet,” reads the headline. The report then goes on to name and shame the businesses that have had the temerity to continue to advertise on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

This is not news reporting. This is activism. It is a poorly disguised effort by a major newsroom to pressure companies into boycotting a social media platform that is too committed to political neutrality and too opposed to political censorship for the media’s taste. In any other time and place, the press would have mocked and condemned the CNN article. But these are unusual times. Many journalists today agree with CNN’s shaming tactics and the reasons behind them, and so the Facebook report came and went this week with barely a whimper of objection from our brave Fourth Estate.

If It Weren’t for Double Standards, Our Media Would Have None By Angela Kelley

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/02/if-it-werent-for-double-standards-our

The Marxist blood running in the veins of the media, of celebrities in Hollywood, in nearly every Democratic politician, and unfortunately some weak sister Republicans, demands that we do not question the Left.

Since the death of George Floyd in May, the top headlines every day report that the protests stem from his alleged murder. Though the left-leaning woke media insists on describing the protests as “peaceful,” they have spiralled into destructive rioting and are responsible for deaths, in some cases, at the hands of Marxist opportunists looking to upend our Founders, our institutions, our Constitution, and our way of life. 

An MSNBC reporter standing in front of burning buildings said, “This is mostly a protest, it is not, it is not, generally speaking, unruly.” In the face of destroyed buildings (including a brand new low-income housing unit), looting, lawyers tossing Molotov cocktails into police cars, and the shooting death of David Dorn (a retired policeman who was guarding his friend’s business), the legacy media continues on with this “peaceful change” narrative.

Legacy media, as well as Antifa and some Black Lives Matter activists are little more than opportunists. They can “never let a crisis go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel and now Hillary Clinton like to say. The progressive media understands what this means, and while it’s interesting to see how the news anchors, editors, and writers all seem to have similar talking points, they may only be loosely tied to actual Democratic directives. They don’t really need marching orders anymore. They are so very tightly anchored to the same political philosophies, attitudes, and methods that they speak as one voice even without prompting. As Alinskyite Democrats, they know “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.”

The mainstream media continuously ignore the weekly shootings in Chicago and other large cities. Two young children died this past weekend in Chicago from the violence, and  at least 16 other people are dead while at least 50 others were wounded in shootings. These people matter too. The children matter. The adults matter. The police who put their lives on the line every day for people in those communities matter.

Stalin, Famine, and the New York Times By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/movie-review-mr-jones-tells-truth-about-new-york-times-communism/#slide-1

Mr. Jones tells the truth about Moscow’s man at the Paper of Record.

 ‘T he world is being invaded by monsters, but I suppose you don’t want to hear about that,” Both clauses of that sentence are devastatingly true: The reference is equally to the horrors of the Soviet Union’s mass murders — and to the West’s determination to turn its back to the monstrosity. The speaker is George Orwell; the subject is Stalinism. Orwell is preparing to write a book called Animal Farm in which the farmer is named Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones, it turns out, is also the name of an Orwell acquaintance who might have been an inspiration in his writing: Jones is a Welsh reporter, first name Gareth, who is our vantage point for the Stalin-engineered Ukraine famine of the 1930s that amounted to the state-ordered murder of more than three million people by seizing the region’s grain. At the outset of the film Mr. Jones (which is just out via VOD services) is seen pleading to a team of politicos led by David Lloyd George, a former British prime minister in 1933. Jones (played with a combination of determination and disbelief by James Norton) advises the Brits that Herr Hitler, whom he has recently interviewed, has already started a war on western civilization and that a similar threat is building in the Soviet Union. Guffaws greet everything Jones says, and he gets the sack from Lloyd George. “It is me you need, I’m the only one who tells you the truth,” Jones tells the grand old man, but the ex-premier isn’t interested. So Jones goes to Moscow anyway, pretending he has Lloyd George’s blessing.

Kayleigh McEnany, media critic By Bill Grueskin……See note please

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/kayleigh-mcenany-trump-white-house.php

This column was clearly meant to trash McEnany but actually highlights her welcome ripostes to the ” calumnists”….rsk

White House press secretaries make a good salary—around $183,000 a year, almost half the president’s pay. But taxpayers are getting a bargain in Kayleigh McEnany, who has taken on two roles: first, as the president’s spokesperson, and second, as a media critic, offering unsolicited but carefully researched and rehearsed critiques of news coverage writ large.

McEnany, a Harvard Law graduate who got her start as a combative Trump supporter on CNN, has been press secretary for less than three months. It’s dicey to make a lot of predictions about her future, given that she is the fourth person to hold this job in three-and-a-half years, succeeding Sean Spicer (182 days), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (705 days), and Stephanie Grisham (281 days). (All of them lasted longer than 11-day White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci.)

McEnany got off to a promising start with her first briefing on May 1: “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” she told reporters in the White House briefing room. And then, at the same briefing, McEnany made clear that she, like Trump, sees herself as an assignment editor. She was asked about Michael Flynn’s efforts to pull back on his guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI. She responded by telling the press corps that they were, in essence, asking the wrong question, and should instead focus its attention on an FBI agent’s notes (“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie?”) written before the Flynn interview.

Why Do The Media Ignore Good News About The Stock Market And Economy?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/01/why-do-the-media-ignore-good-news-about-the-stock-market-and-economy/

Our TV-based media, so besotted with the far-left progressive agenda they now espouse, no longer seem to care about some issues of great importance – that is, unless they reflect badly on President Donald Trump or Republicans . This double standard is especially true of such bread-and-butter issues as the state of the economy and markets, which have an enormous effect on all Americans, including the so-called progressive ones.

Amid all the nonstop televised gloom and doom over the coronavirus, something strange happened in the second quarter of this year: Stock market prices soared. The Dow Jones Industrial Index jumped 18%, the S&P 500 gained 20% and the tech-oriented Nasdaq surged 31%.

Those numbers, coming on the heels of the pandemic, were good enough to be the biggest quarterly gains in 20 years.

Yet, that boom warranted nary a mention on the Big Three TV networks. For full coverage, you had to go outside to financial publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily, the newspaper where Issues & Insights was started before becoming a stand-alone editorial and opinion site.

We were prompted to mention this by the headline we saw in the reliable and always interesting media watchdog site MRC NewsBusters: “Big Three CENSOR Stocks after ‘Best Quarter’ in 20-Plus Years, Despite Virus Spike.”

“The trend of ignoring news when it’s good continues for the Big Three evening news shows,” the story said, noting that when retail sales soared 17.7% in May, the biggest jump on record, both ABC and NBC ignored it.

Media Ignores Facts to Claim a Trump Gotcha By John Lott

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/01/media_ignores_facts_to_claim_a_trump_gotcha.html

The media keeps going out of its way to fact check President Trump’s claims as false. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump is one of many journalists who can’t be bothered with considering the most obvious interpretations of what Trump says. Instead, he ventures into the nonsensical.

Last week, Trump said the 20 most dangerous U.S. cities are run by Democrats; Bump then wrote an article saying Trump erred — by Bump’s count, only 17 of the 20 cities are run by Democrats. Social media mocked Bump’s analysis for quibbling over whether Trump was exactly right or not, but what they failed to point out is that Bump’s underlying numbers are wrong. 

Trump earned Bump’s ire by saying that if you are going to blame anyone for the condition of police departments in American cities, you need to blame the Democrats who have been running them.

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” Trump said last Wednesday. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of twenty. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.” He has made similar statements many times.

The Post’s headline summarizes Bump’s conclusion: “Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.”

Media Are Playing Games Yet Again With Anonymous Russia Leaks

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/media-are-playing-games-yet-again-with-anonymous-russia-leaks/

Watch nearly the entire corporate media establishment run wild with claims from completely anonymous sources in the intelligence community this week.

Much of the case for the Iraq War was based on the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When the United States declared an end to the war late in 2011, more than 4,400 American military members had been killed and nearly 32,000 wounded. No weapons of mass destruction had been found.

It’s one of the most significant and catastrophic intelligence errors in U.S. history. A bipartisan commission found that U.S. intelligence “seriously misjudged” Iraq’s weapons program because of their “heavy reliance on a human source–codenamed ‘Curveball’–whose information later proved to be unreliable.” The commission wrote, “Even more misleading was the river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers over long periods of time–in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)” and other reports that were “more alarmist” and “less nuanced.”

Curveball was Germany’s codename for Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector who claimed to have built mobile weapons laboratories. President George W. Bush highlighted the claims in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, relied heavily on Curveball’s claims. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.”

Powell went on to describe Janabi’s claims at length, concluding, “This defector is currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.”

Years later, Curveball admitted he had completely fabricated his claims out of a desire to oust Saddam Hussein from power.

Fox yanks programming for bigot Louis Farrakhan By Ethel C. Fenig

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/fox_yanks_programming_for_bigot_louis_farrakhan.html

What was Fox thinking?  As Thomas Lifson noted here yesterday, Fox Broadcasting Company offered to broadcast notorious bigoted, racist and anti-Jewish, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s July 4 speech on its new streaming channel, Fox Soul.  As the name implies the this new entity is dedicated to the African-American viewer. The programs aim to celebrate black culture and deal with real topics that impact the everyday lives of the black community through frank and insightful dialogue with local and national influencers.

So some wise pooh-bah at Fox Corporation, whose Fox News known for presenting a welcome alternative to the one sided liberal/left interpretation of the news, thought the arrogant, bigoted, racist, anti-homosexual and anti-Jewish Farrakhan “celebrates black culture”?  And on Independence Day!  Apparently, after some protest  some wiser heads prevailed and instead, according to Fox Soul, the “frank and insightful dialogue” on the holiday, for which blacks understandably might have a more mixed reaction, will stream a “series of speeches” by “black leaders.”    

Washington Post Editor Karen Attiah Calls For ‘Revenge’ Against ‘White Women’By Elle Reynolds

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/29/washington-post-editor-karen-attiah-calls-for-revenge-against-white-women/

The Global Opinions Editor’s comments have since been slammed as “racist” and “violent.”

The Global Opinions Editor for the Washington Post suggested that “white women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s’. And not calling for revenge,” in a now-deleted tweet on Sunday. The editor — whose name is Karen Attiah — never clarified what kind of “revenge” she was encouraging.

She also blamed the “lies and tears” of white women for everything from a 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma to voting for President Trump, in screenshots of her tweets posted by the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy.

Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed Attiah’s words as “sick, bigoted, racist, violent & wrong.”

Others on Twitter interpreted her tweet as a call for race-based violence. Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire asked Attiah to clarify what she meant by “revenge.”

“When that white woman was beaten with two by fours during the riots… is that what you mean by ‘revenge’ or did you have something more fatal in mind?” Walsh tweeted in a reply to Attiah. Attiah refused to respond, instead deleting her original claims.

The Oldest Hatred Rears Its Head – – This week in media anti-Semitism

https://freebeacon.com/media/the-oldest-hatred-rears-its-head/?

The Oldest Hatred Rears Its Head – – This week in media anti-Semitism

It’s been more than two days now since the New York Times opinion page, policed closely by the paper’s readers and employees for evidence of bigotry, published an op-ed that approvingly cites the black anti-Semitism explained away in a 50-year-old essay by the writer James Baldwin.

We’ve been waiting for the reference to spark some sort of backlash and outcry from the paper’s reporters, for the Twitter hashtag decrying the insensitivity, for the internal finger pointing about who dropped the ball and allowed the publication of a piece that could make American Jews feel so unsafe.

Are you surprised to hear it never came?

The piece, by Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi, asked why a Minnesota convenience store called the police on George Floyd. Midway through, Bayoumi casually invoked the historical tensions between blacks and Jews.

“In Harlem in the 1960s, most such stores were Jewish-owned,” Bayoumi writes, offering as evidence James Baldwin’s 1967 essay, also published in the Times, titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” In that essay, Baldwin writes, “It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home.”