RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2020/05/27/new-york-media-coronacoddle-cuomo-n2569503

A bevy of bloggers on the right have highlighted one of the most dramatic examples of comparative coronavirus bias: those reckless Southern Republican governors in Georgia or Florida, who allegedly love commerce more than human lives, versus New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, our apparent national lodestar of competence.

The Republicans get the heat; Cuomo gets press conferences broadcast live across the country as celebrities confess their Cuomo crushes. The Republicans are “dangerous,” and Cuomo gets to joke around with his brother, the CNN host.

This tilt is not only in the “objective” press but also in the prestige brands in opinion journalism. Take The Atlantic, which made a dramatic turn by endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016. In a big NPR story, this was celebrated as rare and historic. Their loathing of Donald Trump never fades.

The Atlantic drew major heat for an April 29 article written by Amanda Mull that trashed Gov. Brian Kemp, titled “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” This article was also celebrated with a story on NPR. Mull took credit for the headline and insisted it was accurate. “I think that working-class Georgians, a group that is largely people of color, are being sacrificed to the state’s economy, largely,” she says.

But Georgia’s reopening made The Atlantic look foolish. Coronavirus cases and deaths didn’t surge. They declined. Mull wrote another article, headlined “The Horror of the Coronavirus Data Lag: Some reopening states are already claiming victory over the coronavirus. But the real consequences won’t be clear for weeks,” in which she insisted it was too early for apologies.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2020/05/26/the-new-york-times-continues-to-pollute-what-used-to-be-journalism-n430112

The Once Mighty Times Is a National Embarrassment

The New York Times is, for better or worse, still the newspaper of record in the United States. That title obviously doesn’t carry the prestige that it once did. The Times has basically won a war of attrition as the newspaper industry across the land continues to fade into irrelevance. If it hadn’t already had such a prominent position in American news consumption, it would be on the verge of disappearing soon too.

The Times just had a particularly offensive Memorial Day Weekend, and I say that as someone who is so used to their biased nonsense that I try not to let it bother me any more.

First — and this may have only offended me — the editorial brain trust at the paper decided to do a gimmicky front page on Sunday that listed the names of Americans  who died from COVID-19. Of course I believe these people should be mourned. What bothered me is that there is a very, very specific group of fallen Americans who we are supposed to remember on Memorial Day Weekend and I found the timing of this to be exceedingly off-putting.

The Times Never Commits Accidental Bias

The timing of the above example was undoubtedly deliberate and intended to deflect from duly honoring our war dead. That was a slight. What the editorial board did to kick off the weekend intended to honor our military dead was egregiously offensive and un-American.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/26/medias-unpunished-lies-hurt-the-nation-far-worse-than-trumps-indefensible-tweets/

The grim joke of the 20th century was that one death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic. Well, in the 21st century age of information warfare, one man’s libel is an outrage. When thousands do it, we call that ‘the news.’

Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting Joe Scarborough somehow murdered a young woman who died of natural causes nearly 20 years ago are reprehensible. This is in no way because these tweets defame Scarborough. It’s pretty hard to feel bad for a guy whose media presence enabled Trump’s political rise to the point he openly flirted with running as his vice president before making a comic heel turn against Trump. (In fact, back when Scarborough was playing footsie with Trump, left-wing blogs were trafficking in this repugnant conspiracy.) Trump’s tweets are awful because of how they have thrust the deceased girl’s memory and her family into the limelight.

This letter written by the dead woman’s husband asking Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to take down the offending Trump tweets is heart-wrenching. It’s exactly the kind of behavior I feared Trump was capable of in 2016 and loomed large in my mind when I made the decision not to vote for him.

So there’s your ritual malediction against Trump, necessary though it may be. Please don’t pretend to be outraged when now it must be explained, once more with feeling, why a torrent of new condemnations of Trump’s indefensible behavior will have no effect on his supporters or the political dynamic heading into November and beyond. And don’t confuse that with approval of Trump’s rhetoric or tweets.

https://spectator.us/blame-china-communist-wuhan-coronavirus/

Is Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Hillary Clinton in drag? I ask because when he takes to the pages of the Washington Post to lecture us that ‘It is time to end the blame game’ with respect to China’s role in helping to spread the coronavirus, I could almost believe I was back at that Congressional hearing after Muslim lunatics attacked the American consulate in Benghazi and murdered four Americans, including the US ambassador. The dulcet strains of the then Secretary of State Clinton skirling ‘at this point what difference does it make?’ are ringing in my ears. It’s ‘time to move on’, she said later, just as China’s ambassador half-pleaded, half-warned about the ‘mindset’ urging a ‘decoupling’ of America from China. ‘The United States would not emerge as a winner from this scenario,’ he said.

Ambassador Cui writes that: ‘China has done its best to share information about the virus.’ Ha, ha, ha. In fact, it dissembled about the nature of the virus, obscuring the date of the first cases, insisting that there was no human-to-human transmission, even as, in mid-January, it ordered its consulates around the world to stock up on face masks and other protective gear in anticipation of a global outbreak. Chinese doctors and scientists who tried to sound the alarm early on suddenly disappeared, even as the regime destroyed evidence and stonewalled requests from western scientists for firsthand information about the earliest victims. Ambassador Cui is paid to lie for his country. We do not have to be naive and believe him.

But many of us do. Much of the western media is behaving like the World Health Organization, i.e., like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist party. As Bill Gertz points out in his just-published book How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick, China’s behavior regarding the coronavirus is like the Soviet Union’s behavior after the deadly explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. ‘The Chinese lied to cover up a major natural disaster — only now the damage is not simply the irradiation of an area in and around a city in Ukraine. The Chinese have inflicted grave damage on the world economy and put half the world’s population out of work, at least temporarily.’

https://spectator.us/short-guide-justifying-re-lockdown/

Fear is gripping the American public health and media establishments: they are losing control. States are belatedly (and far too tentatively) easing their coronavirus lockdowns, many without having met the absurd CDC benchmarks for doing so. Customers are joyfully returning to previously shuttered restaurants and parks, some even discarding that symbol of subjugation: the outdoor mask.

The mainstream media and health experts are not going down without a fight, however; their newfound power over almost the entirety of human life has been too exhilarating to give up now. Their reaction to the current rebellion provides a glimpse of the strategies that will be deployed during the much-hyped ‘second wave’ of infections this fall in order to shut the economy down again.

The extent of media panic became clear in mid-May. On May 15, CNN checked back in to Georgia, that blackguard state that had started reopening in April without expert pre-clearance, drawing a rebuke even from President Donald Trump. On April 21, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that Georgia governor Brian Kemp was seeking to ‘turn his state into the place to die.’

Three weeks later, things were not looking good for the proponents of indefinite shutdown. ‘Since reopening late last month,’ CNN glumly reported, ‘Georgia hasn’t seen a spike in coronavirus cases.’ Time to change the standards for success: ‘But there also hasn’t been a significant decrease in new case counts,’ the cable channel added. New case counts had decreased — 6 percent over a week — but the drop just wasn’t ‘significant,’ by CNN’s lights. Moreover, CNN pointed out, that downward trend was ‘unsteadily downward,’ as if any set of data does not have daily fluctuations.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/24/the-doctrine-of-media-untruth/

When knowledge, wisdom, independent thought, even basic competence were no longer requisites for success, then the media naturally slid into mediocrity, and mastered networking and obsequiousness instead of valuing independence.

As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.

Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”

Take the strange case of the respective records of liberal New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida counterpart Ron DeSantis. Both states have roughly equal populations, with Florida slightly larger by about 2 million. Both have populations that travel daily back and forth between their respective major cities. Both are major international tourist and travel hubs. Both have widely diverse populations.

Both have large numbers of retirees and long-term-care homes. Yet, New York has suffered 14 times the number of coronavirus deaths as has Florida. Florida is now increasingly open, and on May 19 saw 54 deaths attributed to the virus. That same day, New York was completely locked down and yet saw nearly twice that number at 105 deaths.

One would never know from the media of the contrasting fates of the two states during the epidemic.DeSantis is often rendered little more than a reckless leader who exposed Floridians to needless danger. Cuomo, in contrast, increasingly is deified by the media as likely presidential timber who finesses press conferences in the lively fashion of his legendary beloved father, and iconic liberal, Mario Cuomo.

Yet on the principle of media’s commitment to untruth, the public legitimately could deduce from the hagiographic news coverage that the frenetic Cuomo has proven the most incompetent governor in the nation in dealing with the virus. He sent the infected into vulnerable long-term care homes. He neither applied social distancing to, nor cleaned, mass transit. And Cuomo exaggerated his need for some medical supplies, while neglecting shortages in others.

In contrast, the media furor at DeSantis is a good guide to his successes in both mitigating viral fatalities while charting Florida’s path back to economic normality.

Hagiography of the Unfit and Unprofessional

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-cowardice-and-the-collusion-hoax-11590186850?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

To many hack commentators, “conspiracy theory” has become a term used to make certain kinds of implicit and explicit cooperation unacknowledgeable.

With evidence newly in hand last week, we see that the resources poured into promoting the Steele dossier before the 2016 election were nothing next to those mobilized by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta after the inauguration. Transcripts two years old show various Obama officials denying under oath that they possessed evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while they implied the opposite on TV.

Even the outside firm that the FBI relied on for its claim that Democratic emails were hacked by the Russians admitted under oath to finding no evidence that emails had been actually removed from Democratic servers.

Newsies in the aftermath of the Russia hoax now insist they were merely reporting on official actions. They carefully avert their eyes from the fact that the leaks they received and possibly even the official acts they reported were manufactured deliberately to put lies into the news.

If they had any grit, many of our senior reporters would be hopping mad now to learn they had been manipulated into reporting untruths to the public.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

On Monday evening, Connecticut’s version of Ground Hog Day emerged, giving two more weeks of lockdown for hair salons and barber shops. Already, Connecticut was the last of the fifty states to ease restrictions. On the same day, the dyspeptic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, criticized the President for obesity. This from a woman of so many face and body lifts that there is little left of her that God and her parents created.

…….

It may be splitting hairs, but President Trump is wrong when he calls out The New York Times and Washington Post for printing “fake” news. What those papers are printing is “slanted” news, articles biased toward a leftist, political ideology. Fake news is fabricated, while slanted news is prejudiced, where a reporter selects what to emphasize, deemphasize or omit based on personal political preferences. Satire (“An obsolete kind of literary composition, in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.”[1]) is a form of fake news. However, with the exception of good satire, both fake news and biased reporting are a disservice to readers seeking truth. It is the latter that is subtler, so more difficult to discern and address. The burden for determining what is real and what is false is the consumer’s, as reporters have abandoned responsibility to readers and viewers.

Owners, publishers, editors and bloggers can spout whatever opinions they choose. This is a free country and that is their right. But when opinions filter into news stories, and news is reported as unvarnished truth, the consequence is divisiveness and a threat to freedom, which relies on a well-informed citizenry.

Professor Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington teaches a course called, “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.” In a phone interview with Michael Rosenwald, printed in the Columbia Journalism Review in the fall of 2017, he said “The average American spends nearly an hour a day on Facebook. Doing what? Mostly spreading bullshit.” Whether that is true or hyperbole, I do not know, but a Pew Research Center survey in 2016 essentially confirmed the trend. It found that 14% of U.S. adults shared news they knew was fake. Other surveys support the contention that people willingly pass on information they know to be fake, if it aligns with their preconceived political opinions; for example, promoting Trump derangement syndrome has become daily fodder for the leftist media.

Fake news should make us all wary. If something seems amiss, it probably is and should be double-checked. But slanted news is a beast of a different kind, especially when it appears in so-called respectable news sources. In a free country, the press has the right to print or report what they will.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/21/trump-is-winning-his-standoff-with-the-press/

Hard as it is to imagine, the mainstream press has grown even more hostile to President Donald Trump during the epochal COVID-19 crisis. Yet Trump’s approval rating is now higher than the sainted Barack Obama at the same point in his presidency. Is the public finally catching on?

Even more unrelenting than the daily death counts and we-are-all-doomed coverage of the coronavirus has been the media’s increasingly hostile – if you can believe that – coverage of Trump during this once-in-a-lifetime crisis. No matter what he does, the press attacks him for it.

Case in point is CBS News’ Paula Reid.

On Tuesday, Reid asked Trump this question: “Mr. President, why haven’t you announced a plan to get 36 million unemployed Americans back to work? You are overseeing historic economic despair. What’s the delay? Where’s the plan?”

This is the same reporter who just six days earlier was complaining that Trump “continues to push to get America back to work even over the objections from his own medical experts.”

The rest of the press corps has been ferociously attacking Trump for pushing to reopen the economy “too soon” with a steady stream of headlines such as:

“Trump Wants to Starve the States Into Opening Before It’s Safe.”

“As Trump urges reopening, thousands getting sick on the job.”

“Trump Foments Anti-Restriction Protests, Alarming Governors.”

Over the past few months, the press has attacked Trump for being too optimistic, for being too abrasive, for taking medications they don’t approve of. They attacked Trump for being a wannabe dictator, and for being too deferential to states. They alleged that Trump wants to “normalize” coronavirus deaths. They speculated that Trump is alienating seniors.