RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/04/networks-ignore-rosenstein-testimony-after-years-pushing-russia-collusion-story-n491954

If you watched the news yesterday, you probably missed former acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who testified before Congress about his role in the Russia collusion investigation. That’s because the major news networks didn’t cover it. Where coverage of the Russia investigation was wall-to-wall, day after day saturation, the examination of how that investigation got it so spectacularly wrong hasn’t evinced much interest from the press.

As Joseph Wulfsohn of Fox News reports, there appeared to be a studied indifference to Rosenstein’s testimony from the media.

The hearing, which went from late morning to early afternoon, did not receive any live coverage from CNN nor MSNBC, who hyped the Russia collusion narrative for years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 election. Both CNN and MSNBC offered a live-stream of the hearing on their websites.

All three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, also avoided the hearing in their evening programs. They did, however, manage to squeeze in the scathing late-breaking remarks that emerged from former Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis, who denounced President Trump divisiveness in a piece published in The Atlantic just 30 minutes before the evening programs aired on the East Coast.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/02/media-falsely-claimed-violent-riots-were-peaceful-and-that-tear-gas-was-used-against-rioters/

The entire narrative the media glommed onto in lockstep was that Trump was a monster who tear-gassed peaceful protesters to do something meaningless. None of that was true.

Following days of violent riots and looting in cities across the country, Washington, D.C., announced a 7 p.m. curfew on Monday night. About the same time, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from the Rose Garden. Afterward, he walked through Lafayette Park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, which rioters had set on fire the night before. Standing before the church sign, which reads “All are welcome,” President Trump, who previously said he’d be paying his respects to a very special place, held up a Bible.

The speech announcing the country would return to rule of law and protection of civil liberties, the walk through a park that the night before had been given over to rioters, and the visit to the vandalized historic church where every president has worshiped since James Madison, were reassuring to many in the country.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/03/the-media-are-lying-to-you-about-everything-including-the-riots/

The media lied about the Russia collusion hoax, about the Mueller probe, about impeachment, about the coronavirus—and now they’re lying about the riots.

It seems no great event or upheaval in our national life can pass now without the media lying to our faces about it.

They lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in 2016. They lied about the Mueller probe and Brett Kavanaugh and former national security adviser Mike Flynn. They lied about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president and the impeachment farce that ensued. They lied about the coronavirus and the lockdowns and the White House response. And now they’re lying about the riots.

In recent days we’ve heard a steady drumbeat of lies, distortions, and disingenuousness from the mainstream media about almost every aspect of the unrest now gripping American cities. The deceit is almost too pervasive and amorphous to describe, but I’m going to try anyway.

Over the weekend we were told, for example, that the looting and violence was being instigated not by left-wing anarchists and antifa groups but by the media’s favorite villains: white supremacists. CNN, whose Atlanta offices were vandalized Friday, went on and on—without a shred of evidence to back it up—about how white supremacists might be infiltrating the protests and stirring up trouble. The New York Times, in a report that even quoted a senior police official in New York City saying outside anarchist groups were coordinating mayhem before the protests began, nevertheless veered into a long aside about how far-right “accelerationists” were hoping the unrest would bring about a long-sought second civil war.

By Monday, no one was talking about the white supremacist agitators anymore. The media had moved on to better, more plausible lies.

Here’s Matthew Yglesias of Vox, disingenuously comparing the rioters and looters to pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. His snarky tweet is meant to suggest Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is a hypocrite for supporting the Hong Kong protesters but calling for the restoration of order at home.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/this-is-easy-dont-excuse-defend-or-encourage-rioters/

The Left’s privileged commentators don’t have to worry about losing their homes or businesses.

Why do they keep doing it? Decade after decade, generation after generation, progressives keep making the same, elemental mistake: They downplay, excuse, and in extreme cases even encourage urban rioters.

We’ve been down this road before, and it’s a straight stretch of highway with no twists whatsoever. It would take a moral moron to get lost on it, and yet somehow progressives keep managing to do so. This isn’t hard. The people of Minneapolis are right to be angry about the savage death of George Floyd, but rioting will not bring him back or honor his memory, and the riots will make everything even worse. The Democrats and the media should be shouting as loudly as they can: Stop what you’re doing, you’re hurting your cause.

The person closest to Floyd — the deceased man’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross — made exactly this point: “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate” Floyd, Ross told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He loved the city. He came here [from Houston] and stayed here for the people and the opportunities.” She added that people should “know that I understand their frustration” but “I want people to protest in a peaceful way.”

Yet all over the media, progressives are in effect rubbishing these wishes. They support the riots, starting by downplaying the nightmare in Minneapolis as a series of mere “protests” (no, those are what Martin Luther King Jr. engineered — and they worked). Once you’ve reconceived destruction as mere expression, you’ve mentally prepared yourself to take the side of the destroyers.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/28/chris-wallace-and-the-weekly-standard-i

What is happening to Fox News Channel?

With the exception of its primetime lineup and a few regular contributors, Fox News increasingly is indistinguishable from its cable news competitors. The network, once considered the sole antidote to dominant left-wing news organizations—both print and broadcast—is making a fatal brand mistake: Alienating its customer base.

For nearly 25 years, conservatives have depended on Fox News to report the news in a way that represents their views. Conservatives knew issues, like those surrounding the pro-life movement, could count on fair coverage from the network rather than the scorn and derision they get in mainstream media. 

Even recently, Fox News was the only outlet pursuing the biggest scandal in U.S. political history—how Barack Obama used his government henchmen to infiltrate the Trump campaign and then sabotage his presidency after the election.

But there is a noticeable change in the tone at Fox News. Loyal viewers were outraged by the hiring of Clinton lackey and debate-fixer Donna Brazille last year. Other partisan harpies such as Marie Harf and Jessica Tarlov help “balance” Fox News’ political commentary. And Trump haters on the Right—folks who long ago burned their credibility with rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives—continue to earn air time on the network. I mean, Chris Stirewalt? Really?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/its-not-big-tech-decide-whats-true-daniel-greenfield/

Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all engaged in political censorship. But Twitter went into the lion’s den by stuffing Dem talking points into a Trump tweet under the guise of a fact check. (That is essentially what fact checks are, authorization for Democrat media outlets and partners to determine what can be said and what the facts are.) Facebook’s Zuckerberg took pains to distinguish himself from Twitter’s Dorsey.

Unlike Dorsey, Zuckerberg has been careful to reach out to conservatives, which doesn’t change his politics a whit, but he understands that he’s riding the tiger, with Democrats pressing for a Facebook crackdown for not censoring conservatives, and Republicans pushing for a crackdown on Facebook for doing so. I’m not a fan of Zuckerberg, as some of my recent articles make clear, but he’s also in an impossible situation.

Facebook has looked for some sort of ambiguous middle ground, with a bit of fact checking, without giving them too much power, creating a censorship supreme court full of lefties, but throwing in one conservative, all the while making it unclear how much power who really has.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/behemoths-who-control-barr-says-trump-executive-order-on-social-media-companies-will-go-further-if-necessary

Attorney General William Barr praised President Trump for his executive order that could allow federal regulators to take punitive action against social media giants for the way they regulate online content.

Trump’s order rolls back the long-standing legal protection known as Section 230, which spares tech companies from being held liable for the content they allow online and how they decide to monitor it.

Barr said the protection, which was adopted about 25 years ago, has been stretched beyond its original intention of not holding tech companies accountable for the content created by third-party users.

“It’s been completely stretched to allow what have become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material,” Barr said.

“So when they put on their own content, like fact-check content onto other people’s content and when curate their collection, they start censoring particular content, including in many cases the direction of … governments like communist China, they become publishers. They shouldn’t be entitled to the same kind of shield that was set up earlier,” he continued.

The order comes days after Twitter put a fact-check alert on one of Trump’s tweets, linking mail-in voting to increased voter fraud.

Twitter has taken steps to combat misinformation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic to avoid what it deems potentially dangerous medical hoaxes or advice from spreading throughout the public.

Trump has aggressively pushed back on the action, accusing the company of political bias.

Barr said Trump’s order is a strong step in addressing the problem of increased oversight of tech companies on its users and allow Section 230 to return to its original intent.

“They are using that market power with particular viewpoints,” Barr said. “That is wrong. It has to be addressed, not only to this executive order, but I think litigation going forward.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/27/gallup-poll-shows-that-no-one-thinks-the-media-is-doing-a-good-job-during-the-pandemic-n433478

“When the American people needed a competent, informed, unbiased media the most, they didn’t get it.”

No one trusts the media. Not left, not right, not those who believe themselves to be centrists. So this Gallup-Knight Foundation survey shouldn’t surprise us when both sides believe the media isn’t doing a good job informing the public of the pandemic.

Also not surprisingly, there is a vast difference in perceptions from the public on coronavirus coverage depending on one’s political partisanship.

The survey shows that Democrats believe the media is downplaying the severity of the crisis while Republicans believe the media is exaggerating the dangers.