RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/when_it_comes_to_the_news_media_their_antitrump_narrative_is_relentless.html

The media is all a’flutter about a report saying that the Russian military has been attempting to hack Burisma. It’s unclear to me and to the media whether this is a newsworthy story or just the same old news we’ve seen since 1921, about Russia spying on and making trouble for the West and its allies. For the media, though, any story that can impugn Trump is headline stuff, and that fact is on perfect display in the media’s reporting about the suspected hacking.

Here are the facts: The Russian military has apparently tried to hack Burisma’s computers. That’s it. That’s everything the media knows, as can be seen from this New York Times article:

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for.

On the basis of known facts, this is a story that ought not to have been published at all or, at the very least, should deserve a single paragraph on the last page of the main section.

But that’s not how the Times is spinning it. Instead, for the Times this is just more evidence that (a) Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election (never mind that Obama and Hillary had the slobbering love affair with Putin) and (b) that Trump coerced the Ukrainian president into investigating Burisma.

Regarding the first point, the one about Russia collusion, keep in mind as you read the following the fact that the Times knows absolutely nothing other than that there apparently was a hacking attempt. Nevertheless, it manages to spin out a whole saga:

But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-cant-trust-the-media-to-report-honestly-on-iran/

It’s hard enough watching journalists blaming the United States for the Islamic Republic’s perniciousness or exaggerating the importance of “revered leader” Qasem Soleimani while minimizing the actions of the courageous Iranians who oppose the mullahs. Even before a pro-Iranian regime bias infected much of the institutional media, conservatives were reading outlets like the New York Times through a prism of skepticism. In general, though, one could trust that the underlying facts and framing were basically correct. The past four years have made even that impossible.

Take the Soleimani killing, for example.

In the newest iteration of the story from NBC News, we learn that after Iran shot down a U.S. drone this summer, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Trump’s then-national security adviser, tried to persuade Donald Trump to kill the Iranian terrorist leader. Trump, instinctively uneasy about escalating Middle East conflict, resisted the pressure. According to “current and former senior administration officials,” NBC News states, the president instead drew a red line: He would authorize the killing of Soleimani only “if Iran’s increased aggression resulted in the death of an American.”

Trump even tweeted, warning the mullahs that further violence would have repercussions.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/nyt-nobel-laureate-paul-krugman-claims-hackers-downloaded-child-porn-onto-his-computer/

Paul Krugman, economist at The New York Times, tweeted (and then deleted) a very strange story on Wednesday claiming that someone had hacked his IP address and was using it to download child porn.

“Well, I’m on the phone with my computer security service and as I understand it, someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography. I might just be a random target but this might be an attempt to Qanon me.” He continued, “It’s an ugly world out there.”

Twitter users were quick to point out that that’s not how IP addresses work and if anything was downloaded on his computer it would have been done by him. Hardly anyone believes him. One Twitter user pointed out Microsoft’s answer to users’ concerns: “IP addresses cannot be compromised. It’s just a number that identifies your system on the [typically local] network so that other computers can send responses to its requests…a PC itself can be compromised by malware or other more direct attacks, but this has nothing to do with the IP address itself.”

However, it is possible that the Nobel Prize-winning Boomer really is that bad at technology that he fell for a scam. Tech journalist Mikael Thalen uncovered a Better Business Bureau report that appears to describe the exact phishing attempt Krugman described. Reports the BBB:

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/07/media-beclowns-itself-spreading-fake-news-and-anti-trump-propaganda-during-iranian-rocket-attack/

As Iranian missiles rained down on U.S. military targets in Iraq Tuesday night, two cable news outlets, MSNBC and CNN, spread fake news that suggested that the damage was worse than it was.

The Pentagon confirmed that Tehran fired more than 12 ballistic missiles targeting two military bases used by US and coalition forces in Iraq.

During a broadcast of Hardball on MSNBC, NBC News Tehran bureau chief Ali Arouzi parroted Iranian state media propaganda claiming erroneously that Iranian rockets had killed 30 American soldiers.

“The IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] was saying that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of this country, was in the control center coordinating these attacks,” Arouzi told anchor Chris Matthews. “This bit I’m not sure about but Iran state media says 30 U.S. soldiers have been killed in this attack. This is not confirmed, it’s just coming from Iranian media.”

“This is drawing people from all sides into this what is potentially the beginning of a war, Chris,” Arouzi added. “I don’t know how this is going to go in the coming hours, but it’s not looking good from the rhetoric that came out from President Trump earlier today saying that he will retaliate against any retaliation from Iran. I think we can expect an attack on Iran imminently.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/08/time-magazines-iran-guide-for-parents-refuses-to-call-soleimani-a-terrorist/

Time Magazine’s “Time for Kids” publication issued a guide Tuesday for parents on how to talk with their children about the situation unfolding in Iran riddled with biased omissions.

The legacy outlet first refers to Qasem Soleimani, the recently slain Iranian general responsible for hundreds of American deaths, as a “top military leader in Iran,” rather than a terrorist. In the next line, the guide explains that President Donald Trump took action on Soleimani simply because Trump said Soleimani was a terrorist.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/07/media-reactions-to-soleimani-assassination-are-beyond-parody/

No one expected the U.S. media to take President Trump’s decision to rid the world of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani well, but the MSM’s outpouring of grief over the top terrorist kingpin’s death has reached Onion/Babylon Bee levels of parodic absurdity.

The media has played up Soleimani’s reputation as a brilliant military strategist beloved by his people, while downplaying his responsibility for the destruction of countless lives across the Middle East.

The fact is, Soleimani was a monster.

Qassem Soleimani was responsible for 11 recent attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq even before the one that killed a U.S. contractor; Iranian attacks on neutral, civilian shipping in the Gulf; the attack on Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia; IEDs that killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq. He was the architect of Iran’s strategy of mobilizing militias to destabilize neighboring states and the brutal strategy of bleeding Syria dry.

While we may not be at war with Iran, Soleimani has been at war with the United States for 15 years.

Soleimani was also notoriously brutal to his own people, as Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad pointed out in the Washington post.

This past November, thousands of Iranians took to the streets across the country to protest against the regime, in the biggest challenge to the clerical rule in 40 years. According to Reuters, more than 1,500 people were killed by security forces, including units of Soleimani’s Revolutionary Guard, and at least 7,000 have been arrested. The Internet was shut down for five days

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/ny-times-embarrasses-itself-again-iran-911-ties-kenneth-r-timmerman/

The sloppy New York Times is once-again embarrassing itself. In a prominent “fact-check” piece appearing on Friday, cub reporter Zach Montague ripped into Vice President Mike Pence for a series of tweets that described the terror-drenched record of the ex-Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleymani.

At issue was Pence’s account of Suleymani’s links to the September 11, 2001 attacks on America. In one tweet, the vice president noted that Suleymani and his terrorists “assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the Untied States.

Assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) January 3, 2020

This prompted the NY Times to snipe, “How Mr. Pence arrived at this number and this account is unclear” since there was nothing in “public United States intelligence” [sic] linking the two, or indeed, anyone in Iran to the 9/11 attacks.

Montague could have consulted former NY Times Philip Shenon, whose 2008 book about the 9/11 Commission reprised a story I revealed several years earlier about the discovery by Commission staff of some 75 highly classified NSA intercepts that spelled out in great detail the help Iran offered al Qaeda in furtherance of the 9/11 plot.