RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/04/softball-cnn-interview-with-iranian-ambassador-borders-on-propaganda/

For three years now, CNN has dedicated itself almost exclusively to attacking Donald Trump. It’s own laughable claim of being straight, objective news is clearly abject nonsense to anyone who has watched it for more than 5 minutes. And that’s all fine. All news outlets have their biases, and while it would be nice if CNN owned theirs, it doesn’t really matter if they refuse to. But last night something happened that didn’t just look like anti-Trump sentiment, but rather straight up Iranian propaganda.

Anchor Erin Burnett interviewed Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Mavid Ravanchi, and what viewers were treated to was not so much an interview as a joint press release. From the first question, whether the US had committed an act of war by killing Qasem Solemiani, to the final one, whether this act of war “changes the game,” everything was framed as poor Iran being bullied by a President Trump who at best overreacted and who at worst is lying to the American people.

Not only was there no push back whatsoever in regard to any of the claims made by Ravanchi, several vital questions went completely unasked. How on earth can one interview the Iranian ambassador without asking about Iranian support for a violent attack on an American embassy last week? Or how about an attack on a base that left an American contractor dead? Or the shooting down of an American drone over international waters?

Time and again in the interview Ravanchi claimed that by killing Solemiani the US had moved from an economic war (pulling out of the Iran Deal) to a military war. But Iran has engaged in military actions against America and American interest for months now. The network that fatuously insists they are all about the facts allowed the ambassador to flat out lie to the their viewers without the least bit of resistance.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/02/washington-post-vs-the-steele-dossier/

In a compelling, if incomplete, account of some of the worst media actors in the Russian collusion hoax, the Washington Post neglects its own complicity.

In the thick catalog of media players responsible for promoting the phony Russia collusion storyline, the Washington Post occupies a marquee spot. The Post arguably inflicted the most damage on the first few months of Donald Trump’s presidency by pushing the concocted collusion drama even before Inauguration Day.

The Post first published illegally leaked classified information about former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in early 2017; articles detailing Flynn’s intercepted conversations with the Russian ambassador led to Flynn’s ouster in February 2017.

In April 2017, the Post first revealed the foreign intelligence surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. Several unnamed government officials leaked the explosive news that a former Trump campaign advisor was under government surveillance for his suspected ties to the Kremlin. The purpose of the report was to legitimize the rapidly unfolding narrative that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians to hijack the 2016 election.

Since then, thousands of articles, columns, and editorials bolstering the hoax have dominated the paper’s website. In fact, Post reporters and editors met with dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson months before Election Day as they attempted to plant damaging stories about Team Trump’s canoodling with Russians.

After Steele’s name became public in early 2017, the Post routinely portrayed Steele as a trustworthy “former British intelligence officer” just trying to protect Americans from the Putin puppet running for president.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/27/the-liberal-medias-sordid-history-of-russia-ukrain/

It’s not been a good year for major media.

First, they were caught red-handed as shills for the fake Russian collusion narrative that convulsed the nation for nearly three years.

Then, they were exposed as barkers for the fake Ukraine scandal while the real thing — Joe Biden’s pay-for-play scheme and $1 billion “quid pro quo” while he was President Obama’s vice president — still goes largely unexamined.

Truth be told, this kind of slanted reporting involving Russia and Ukraine has a long pedigree.

In 1932, The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Joseph Stalin’s USSR. Duranty lied repeatedly, issuing reports that all was well, even as Stalin was killing millions, mostly in Ukraine, by starvation and executions.

“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,” Duranty wrote for The Times in November 1931. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he wrote in August 1933.

More revealingly, he wrote, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” in May 1933. These and more damning excerpts were reported by the Columbia Beacon, a student paper that has called on Columbia University’s Pulitzer Committee to revoke Duranty’s prize.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/al-sharpton-warns-democrats-over-impeachment-focus-deal-with-kitchen-table-issues/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third
Al Sharpton Warns Democrats over Impeachment Focus: ‘Deal with Kitchen-Table Issues’By Tobias Hoonhout

Sharpton warned that a hyper-focused Democratic effort to impeach Trump could distract from a vision of “how we move forward.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON….AN INVETERATE NEVER TRUMPER

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-presidency-democrats-squander-case-against-him/
Trump Isn’t a Nazi. He’s a Failure. By Kevin D. Williamson

But Democrats can’t capitalize on the president’s broken promises.

Why doesn’t Williamson leave the N.R. again? rsk

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-debate-president-meets-four-tests-for-impeachment/?
Trump Meets the Four Tests for Impeachment By Ramesh Ponnuru

He is unwilling to distinguish between the common good that government is supposed to serve and his own narrow interests.

Does anyone with a pulse care what Ponnuru thinks about anything? rsk

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/cnn-is-not-a-news-network/

And Jim Acosta is no reporter

When ThinkProgress announced that it was going out of business, a few observers wondered aloud, “Why didn’t anybody buy it?” But why would they have, when we have CNN?

As a child, I was aware of CNN in part because its introductory bumper featured the sinister voice of Darth Vader, and in part because it was both the prototype and the stereotype of the 24-hour news channel. CNN showed up in movies, either as itself or in parodies that imitated its role. It was on in the airports and the hospitals and the hotel lobbies, and in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. When something bad or exciting was happening, you would tell your friends, “Turn on CNN.”

CNN was careful and self-consciously nonpartisan — or, at least, it was keen for viewers to believe that it was. Its slogans were “This is CNN” — well, yes — and “The most trusted name in news,” and it cultivated its position within the firmament in much the same way as does Wikipedia today. It could be sensationalist and intrusive at times, but it was sensationalist and intrusive in the way that the paparazzo is rather than in the way that protesters who bang drums in your face and insist that you give up gasoline are. In short, it was what it said it was: a news network.

It is no longer that. These days, CNN is a peculiar and unlovely hybrid of progressive propaganda outlet, oleaginous media apologist, sexless cultural scold, and frenzied Donald Trump stalkerblog. When news breaks, it is no longer useful or appropriate to tell someone, “Turn on CNN,” because if he did, he would be as likely to be presented with a wall of advocacy and obsession as with the headlines of the hour. Today, CNN does not broadcast the news; it broadcasts what it wants you to think the news is. At long last, it has become Fox.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-removes-thousands-of-accounts-linked-to-saudi-government-influence-operation/

Twitter announced Friday that it has pemanently removed over 88,000 accounts associated with Saudia Arabia, many of which were linked to state actors.

The mammoth social media platform said in a blog post that it has released data about 5,929 now removed accounts linked to a “significant state-backed information operation” originating in Saudi Arabia for violating Twitter’s platform manipulation policies.

That group of accounts was part of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaging in “spammy behavior,” Twitter’s investigative team found. The platform has permanently suspended all of the network’s accounts and shared details about the network with peer companies, according to the blog post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/time-mag-chooses-school-skipping-brat-over-daniel-greenfield/

Time Mag’s ‘Lefty Cause of the Year” came down to a race between endorsing the removal of President Trump from office or endorsing the destruction of civilization through radical environmentalism. 

In the choice between the particular, the ‘whistleblower’, and the general, environmentalism, Eric Ciaramella lost out to Greta Thunberg.

The moral of the story here is that if you skip school, you cut ahead in line of the guy with an actual career.

Meanwhile the millions of people in Iran, Venezuela, and Hong Kong, fighting for freedom were ignored by the same media that once glamorized Arab Spring Islamist protesters. Christians fighting Communism, starving Venezuelans fighting Socialism, and Persians fighting Shiite theocracy, are not the media’s idea of the kinds of causes it wants to promote.

And so, while sidelining the people risking their lives to fight for freedom, Time decided to honor an obnoxious brat who became an international celebrity for skipping school until civilization is destroyed.

Everyone has their priorities. Especially the media.