RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theeditors.com/p/wall-street-journal-fuels-sanders-socialism-gabriel-zucman-billionaires?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

My morning Wall Street Journal had a box on the front page with a graphic headlined “The Rich Get Even Richer,” teasing a news article inside under the headline “Richest of Rich Gain $1 Trillion.”

That eight-paragraph article on page two included six paragraphs that contained mention of or attribution to Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. The page-two graphic, which is bigger than the story, is also attributed, in fine print, to “Gabriel Zucman, analysis of Forbes, Fortune, and Federal Reserve data….”

This is garbage on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start.

For one thing, Zucman is just one economist of many, and he’s not super-credible. The New York Times reported in 2020: “Other economists, including some who held top jobs under past Democratic presidents, have attacked Mr. Zucman and Mr. Saez over their research methods, their policy conclusions and their data. Conservative economists say their proposals would cripple economic growth. Last year, the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government voted to offer Mr. Zucman, 33, a tenured position. But Harvard’s president and provost nixed the offer, partly over fears that Mr. Zucman’s research could not support the arguments he was making in the political arena, according to people involved in the process.”

For another thing, the present tense of the front-page and page-two headlines isn’t supported by this year’s reality, at least to date. The richest of the rich have taken a hit this year so far owing to the stock market downturn related to the Trump tariffs, Congress’s slow motion on a tax cut bill, the Federal Reserve’s decisions to stop cutting interest rates since Trump’s inauguration, or whatever else you want to blame it on. Zucman wants to talk about how much richer the rich got in 2024 because it supports his policy agenda of raising taxes, but he doesn’t want to talk about how these same people saw their wealth plunge in 2025 because so much of their assets are at risk, tied up in stock of companies that they built. The Journal items would have been good headlines four months ago. Now, they read like old news. And anyone who has been on one of those Forbes lists can tell you how reliable or unreliable they are. They are not exactly chacarterized by super-high high precision. When I was at the New York Sun we once figured out that Forbes was counting Michael Bloomberg as worth $5 billion when the real number was more like $20 billion. In its prime, the Wall Street Journal did its own research on this stuff, rather than rely on some left-wing economist’s regurgitation of numbers from Forbes. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in social science research.

I rolled my eyes and put the newspaper away. The editorial page is so strong—Ruth Wisse!, etc.—that I cut the news columns some slack.

Then I opened up X on my phone and saw Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, making a talking point out of the Journal story.

“Today in America, the rich are getting richer & working families are struggling. What is Mr. Trump doing about this? He’s getting ready to give tax cuts to billionaires while making it harder for Americans to access the Medicare, Social Security & veterans benefits they earned,” Sanders posted, with a screenshot of the Journal story and the “WSJ” logo.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/larry-david-mocks-trump-as-hitler-in-the-ny-times-now-but-the-paper-fawned-over-adolf-in-33/

“Imagine my surprise,” writes left-of-Stalin-himself “comedian” Larry David in a New York Times op-ed Monday, “when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.”

Although Larry has looked about 105 years old for the last couple of decades and could be even older, he wasn’t actually reporting on something that happened to him. He was mocking and indirectly excoriating his fellow leftist Bill Maher for meeting Trump and speaking honestly about the meeting, telling the world that Trump really wasn’t the evil monster of leftist propaganda.

Yeah, wow, what an amazing new comedic idea: Trump is Hitler! Larry, how did you ever come up with this fantastic analogy that no one on planet Earth has ever thought of before? As PJM’s own Scott Pinsker put it, Larry David’s op-ed was “astonishingly tone-deaf” as “became the 500 millionth member of the left to think it’s clever, witty, and daring to compare President Trump to Adolf Hitler.” Scott called it (correctly) the “dopiest, sleaziest NYT op-ed in years.”

It could, in fact, be the dopiest, sleaziest, most tone-deaf New York Times article of any kind since July 9, 1933, just over five months after Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and years after his virulent antisemitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide. On that day, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Kamala Harris during her campaign and of Old Joe Biden during his presidency. It bears more than a little resemblance to Larry David’s imaginary dinner with Hitler, but it is all too real.

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she turned out to be an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, for she appears to have been something of a Hitler fan. In the presence of this man whose name has become today synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator. A shock of straight hair falls over his forehead.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/23/the-press-is-back-in-full-frenzy-mode-but-this-time-nobody-is-listening/

You’d think the mainstream press would have learned a lesson or two after committing so many embarrassing mistakes in its effort to “get” Donald Trump and cover up for Joe Biden over the past eight years. But no. It’s already back to its old and terrible habits.

Shortly after the election, Vanity Fair published a story that led with this admonition to the press: “Every outrage and insult can’t be a five-alarm fire, as it’s critical for the media to stay focused on the most serious threats to America’s democratic institutions.”

Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson cautioned her colleagues to “watch and restrain headlines on stories that are needlessly hyperbolic or over-the-top negative.”

Brian McGory, former Boston Globe editor, said it’s “time to cover his actions and policies, his successes and his failures. To do it through as conventional a lens as possible, while not normalizing mayhem, and a willingness to acknowledge when things go well.”

But instead of heeding this advice, the mainstream press went right back to its frantic Trump-hating roots.

https://www.aol.com/larry-david-skewers-bill-maher-185528885.html

Larry David doesn’t sound happy about Bill Maher’s dinner with President Donald Trump.

The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, 77, published a satirical essay in The New York Times on April 21 that appeared to be a response to Maher’s recent meeting with the president at the White House.

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Maher and David for comment.

The fictional piece was written from the perspective of a person who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and came away impressed that the Nazi leader was so personable, despite having been a “vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning.”

David, who is Jewish, never mentioned Maher or Trump in the article, but the language he used closely mirrored the way the “Real Time” host spoke about his dinner with Trump.

“I found the whole thing quite disarming,” David’s essay read. “I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/media-sneers-as-trump-meets-with-european-leader-who-vows-to-make-the-west-great-again/

Donald Trump was re-elected president in 2024, vowing to resume his struggle to end the hegemony of the leftist political elites and restore the government to the people. Those leftist elites aren’t in Washington alone; they’re also in Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, and most of the other capitals of Europe.

There is, however, a handful of notable exceptions: several European countries have leaders who care as much about their own people as Trump does about Americans, and who are working to end the left’s dominance and restore sane government. One of them, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, came to the White House last Thursday and had a cordial meeting with Trump.

Despite the fact that the U.S. visit of a European leader who declared herself to be entirely in agreement with Trump’s guiding philosophy was a significant event, establishment media coverage was sparse. What there was of it was notable for being even more sneering and condescending than usual.

The Washington Post focused its coverage before the Trump-Meloni meeting on the assumption, which turned out to be false, that Meloni was in Washington to conclude a trade deal with Trump on behalf of the European Union; its Wednesday story on the planned meeting was headlined “Europe pins trade hopes on Italy’s Meloni, its Trump whisperer.” Because, you see, the president of the United States is like an animal who can’t be communicated with in any ordinary way; a person with special talents for communicating with dumb beasts has to be called in. That’s how the left sees Trump.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-does-not-show-harrison-ford-making-pro-palestinian-speech-2024-05-08/

A video showing actor Harrison Ford talking about climate change at a United Nations summit in 2019 has been miscaptioned online as him making a pro-Palestinian speech.

The clip was falsely captioned online as students in universities across the U.S. protested, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from companies linked to Israel.

A social media post

, opens new tab sharing the video online said: “Harrison Ford is Pro-Palestine.”

VERDICT

Miscaptioned. The video shows Harrison Ford talking about the young people who want to protect the environment at the UN Climate Action Summit 2019.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/04/13/washington-posts-clinging-to-fake-story-reminds-us-what-the-media-really-is-n4938874

There couldn’t possibly be a clearer example of media perfidy and dishonesty: back in May 2017, the Washington Post published a story about how President Trump supposedly urged Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers to deny that there was any evidence that he had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. There was just one catch: the story was false, and Rogers said as much to the FBI as far back as June 2017. Yet not only did the Post not take the story down; it’s still up, eight years later and long after the Russian Collusion hoax has been definitively debunked.

The story was one of many in the Post about Trump’s much-publicized collusion with Russia that won the Post the Pulitzer Prize. And apparently that was all that mattered. Truth? Accuracy? Integrity? Come on, man! 

The story, along with the rest about the alleged Russian Collusion, sold papers, and made the WaPo seem as if it was once again on the cutting edge of investigative journalism. The Post was even fearlessly taking on a president of the United States, recalling the heady days of Watergate when Woodward and Bernstein bearded the wily Tricky Dick, became Redford and Hoffman, and made the Post into one of the leading newspapers in the left’s constellation of propaganda organs.

The opportunity to relive the glory days was apparently too much for the Post, and overrode all other considerations. As Matt Margolis noted Sunday, “it’s unclear whether the Post knew Rogers disputed their report before publishing it, but Rogers made it clear to investigators shortly afterward that the story was false.” 

Did Rogers, or the FBI, notify the Post also that the story was false? That is unclear, but the WaPo should have made it its business to know. It was, after all, a newspaper, and not just any newspaper, but one that was leading the covering of the allegations of collusion against the sitting president. Did the Post have no contact with Rogers despite the fact that its story was about him? Did it have no contacts in the FBI? Or was the story just too good, too damning of Trump, for the Post to be all that concerned about accuracy?