RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/30/rhetoric-lies-and-the-media-a-quintilian-perspective-on-modern-journalism/

Where’s Quintilian when you need him? The author of the twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria (c. AD 95) knew all there was to know about rhetoric, “the art,” as Aristotle said, “of persuasion.” Quintilian’s chief concern was with turning out able and virtuous orators. But in the course of his inquiries, he also analyzed the workings of deceitful or fraudulent oratory. What a rich hunting ground our dishonest media today would have given the old Roman!

It is amusing to speculate on what Quintilian might have made of The New York Times, for example, a recent story in our former paper of record titled “Elon Musk Is South African. We Shouldn’t Forget It.” Musk left his native South Africa in the late 1980s. He never looked back. But according to the Times, Musk was irredeemably tainted by the racial policies of South Africa. He is, the Times  informed its readers, “a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa.” Really?

What follows is an extraordinary web of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies. Quintilian would have delighted in explaining how it all works.

He would also have found much to work with in “Trump’s Assault on Elites Encompasses Almost Every Aspect of American Life,” Stephen Collinson’s recent essay for CNN. Considered simply as an exercise in mendacious rhetoric, it deserves some sort of prize. I think of it as Mary McCarthy thought of Lillian Hellmann. When asked by Dick Cavett what she found to be dishonest about Hellmann, McCarthy said, “Everything. I once said in an interview that everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

So it is with Collinson’s flaccid but scuttling effort to attack Donald Trump.

https://thespectator.com/topic/pbs-npr-received-public-funding-hearing/

Congress has been mulling the future of publicly-funded television and radio. Here’s a spoiler alert: that funding is toast.

There is no way a Republican-controlled House and Senate will keep pouring money into networks they believe hate them. They know that hatred is warmly reciprocated.

The debate about partisan bias at PBS and NPR is important – the bias itself is obvious – but that’s not the most important point. What matters most is that democratic governments have no business funding or controlling news channels directed at their own citizens. Those channels should be privately owned and operated. Every single one. They should not only be private: they should be beyond the scope of government censorship and intimidation, the kind the Biden administration exerted on social media giants during Covid.

Why is it important to end public ownership of radio and TV networks? Because that is the best way to encourage robust debate about public policies. In a constitutional democracy like ours, the proper role of a government is to foster that public debate by 

Providing as much information as possible;
Avoiding the suppression of differing views unless they violate the law; and
Letting citizens and their elected representatives control the discourse without government interference, except to enforce the law

To facilitate that debate, public officials have a core responsibility: they should share information that citizens need. They should except only disclosures that would violate personal privacy or harm national security or ongoing law-enforcement operations. No one argues about this exception on privacy grounds. No one says those people abused by Jeffrey Epstein should be harmed again by the FBI releasing their names.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/rolling-stone-warns-doge-staffers-family-has-ties-to-russian-oligarch/

In an exclusive report online, far-Left Rolling Stone magazine, which has arguably the worst track record of any journalism outlet for posting false and defamatory stories that suit its political bias, warns that there is a new staffer at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “seeking access to sensitive data at the IRS – and his family has ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch”! [Emphasis added]

Drawing on stories from other Left-wing propaganda outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times, Rolling Stone (RS) reports that two DOGE representatives, Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, have been at the IRS “seeking private taxpayer information in unprecedented ways that would violate current IRS privacy law” in order to hunt down fraud.

Never mind that Rolling Stone couldn’t have cared less about the Democrat Party under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden violating taxpayers’ rights by weaponizing the IRS against conservatives. But when DOGE digs through IRS information exposing massive bureaucratic fraud, suddenly it’s an invasion of the average taxpayer’s privacy.

RS complains – as if it’s a bad thing – that Musk has led a “blitz” through federal agencies, firing thousands of federal workers, while “demanding sweeping access to sensitive personal data.” The former music magazine, which is fond of glorifying Islamic terrorists on its cover, also tries feebly to diminish DOGE staffers like Gavin Kliger, 25, as “young” and “inexperienced” – as if youth is a drawback in the tech world. As Musk has put it, “Judging an engineer by age is BS.”

The thrust of the “exclusive” investigation is this:

Corcos, 36, founded the health care start-up Levels in 2019 with a former SpaceX lead engineer Dr. Casey Means, a holistic doctor with “ties” (there’s that ominous word again) to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RS does not elaborate on what those ties are, or on how RFK Jr. is a factor in this dark conspiracy. But it notes that Levels received seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm led by Trump donor (gasp!) Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, son of Freedom Center founder David Horowitz (gasp!).