RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/first-leftist-hysterical-fit-of-new-trump-era-musk-gives-nazi-salute/

The left has just suffered a series of staggering rebukes. Not only did their campaign to destroy Donald Trump and his movement fail spectacularly, but his second Inaugural Address was a forthright and comprehensive declaration of war against the policy agendas they have pursued for decades now. The establishment media, meanwhile, has likewise been rejected on a grand scale, with Elon Musk even proclaiming repeatedly that citizen journalists and news analysts on his X platform “are the media now.” That is likely why Musk became the target on Monday afternoon of the first leftist freakout of the new Trump administration: it seems that he gave a Nazi salute, and that reveals what this Make America Great Again business is all really about, now, doesn’t it?

A CNN talking head said: “It’s a salute. It was quick. I think our viewers are smart and they can take a look at that, but it certainly was, it’s not something that you typically see at American political rallies.” Rolling Stone was all over the big story, claiming that actual National Socialists were thrilled: “Right-Wing Extremists Are Abuzz Over Musk’s Straight-Arm Salute.”

The New Republic was in just-asking-questions mode: “Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump’s Inauguration?” was their headline, but they were ready in the article itself to run with the insinuation: “During a speech at Capitol One Arena Monday following Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk appeared to deliver a Roman salute not once, but twice. The gesture is associated with Nazi Germany, and Musk was speaking triumphantly about Trump’s election victory when he made the salute.” The New York Times was a trifle more circumspect, going with “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture: Speaking at a celebratory rally in Washington, Mr. Musk twice extended his arm out with his palm facing down, drawing comparisons to the Nazi salute.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/21/is-trump-ushering-in-an-era-of-responsible-journalism-too/

In his inaugural speech, President Donald Trump talked about ushering in a new golden age for America. Is he also ushering in a new era of responsible journalism?

Yes, that’s harder to believe than any of the other promises Trump made, such as the one about how he’d “keep our children … disease-free.” But we thought we saw a faint glimmer of what honest journalism could look like on Monday.

For years, journalists had decided to label anything Trump said with which they disagreed a lie. That was especially true when it came to any Trump claim about the integrity of the 2020 election.

For example, here’s a headline from the New York Times in October.

This wasn’t about correcting the record. It was about attacking Trump every which way they could. When Joe Biden told an outright lie, the press routinely dismissed it as a “gaffe,” or an “exaggeration,” or just Joe being Joe.

But anytime Trump made a boast, the press would scream “Liar!” If he exaggerated for effect. Liar! It got to the point where if Trump said the sky was blue, the press would call him a liar because, in fact, the sky isn’t blue, it only appears blue because of the way the light interacts with the atmosphere.

But look at the “fact check” the New York Times ran on the day of Trump’s second inauguration.

https://freebeacon.com/media/star-cnn-star-reporter-refuses-to-apologize-to-navy-vet-he-threatened-to-nail-as-bombshell-defamation-case-continues/

PANAMA CITY, Fla.—CNN chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt refused to apologize Monday for falsely accusing a Navy veteran of operating in a “black market” to profiteer off Afghans fleeing their homes. Instead, Marquardt gave conflicting testimony, boasted about his Emmy awards, and defended messages insulting the veteran, Zachary Young.

Young slapped CNN with a $1 billion defamation suit over Marquardt’s report, arguing that The Lead with Jake Tapper segment irreparably harmed his reputation and destroyed his company, Nemex Enterprises. Marquardt’s November 2021 reporting singled out Young, portrayed him as an “illegal profiteer,” and accused him of charging exorbitant prices to help evacuate people during the Biden-Harris administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“I don’t feel the need to apologize to him,” Marquardt said repeatedly on the stand Monday. Shortly after, he touted his various honors. “I’ve won a few Emmy awards. That’s kind of the main award in television news.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper also hasn’t apologized, Young testified last week. Anchor Pamela Brown, however, issued an apology while filling in for Tapper, and the phrase “black market” was removed from the online version of the segment. CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who edited the written portion of the report, testified Friday that the text he approved didn’t include the term “black market” and blamed Tapper and producers for the portrayal.

The liberal network faced several setbacks leading up to the trial. Judge William Henry earlier this month ruled that Young could use at trial Tapper’s disparaging comments about Fox News after its $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Jurors during last week’s selection process appeared open to forcing CNN to cough up a 10-figure payout to Young.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/08/mark-zuckerbergs-bonfire-of-the-orthodoxies/

Move over Elon Musk, another billionaire has hit the headlines. And he didn’t even have to demand the jailing of a prime minister to do so. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Meta. Yesterday he released the most extraordinary video. Sporting unruly curls, a black tee and dog-tag chain – the uniform of the millennial oligarch – he announced that Meta’s platforms would give their ‘fact-checkers’ the heave-ho and ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ they carry out. I doubt a more impactful mea culpa will be issued this year.

We’re coached to be cynical these days, but I’ll be honest with you: Zuckerberg’s statement put a big, dumb smile on my face. Here we had one of the captains of Silicon Valley confessing that the boss class to which he belongs has indeed been enforcing a regime of political censure, while also promising to do something about it. Those of us who think you should be free to wander into the town square of social media and say ‘People with dicks are not women!’ or ‘Covid might have come from a lab!’ have cause to be optimistic this morning.

No longer will users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads have ‘fact-checkers’ peering over their shoulder as they post. Starting in the US, Meta will ‘get rid of fact-checkers’, Zuckerberg said, and ‘replace them with community notes similar to X’. That’s Musk’s user-generated system of correction, where swarms of tweeters can add caveats and additional info to posts that are misleading or untrue. Our fact-checkers have ‘just been too politically biased’ said Zuckerberg, and they’ve ‘destroyed more trust than they’ve created’. Welcome, young man, to we merry few who’ve been arguing for years that ‘fact-checking’ is doublespeak for the sidelining of dissent and enforcement of orthodoxy.

Zuckerberg confessed that the ancien régime of post-policing by ideologues dolled up as fact-checkers led to the punishment of perfectly normal beliefs. On topics like ‘immigration and gender’ there was a ‘bunch of restrictions’, he said. And they were ‘out of touch with mainstream discourse’. Many of us knew this. Many of us knew that Facebook’s memory-holing of ‘anti-immigrant views’ and its sexist disciplining of feminists who think men are not women was an ideological crusade masquerading as a clampdown on ‘hate speech’. But it’s still good to hear the man at the top of that old McCarthyism say it out loud.

https://hotair.com/headlines/2024/12/22/cnn-sees-lowest-ratings-in-network-history-in-2024-n3798138

CNN reportedly wrapped up 2024 with the lowest audience numbers in its history. This is despite election years usually drawing more audience to news outlets in general.  

From December 26, 2023, through December 15, 2024, CNN averaged just 93,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demographic and 488,000 total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research as reported by the Washington Examiner. This trailed Fox News, which dominated with 1.46 million total viewers.   

The poor performance follows disappointing election night coverage, where CNN drew 5.1 million viewers—a massive 44 percent drop from its 2020 election coverage. In comparison, Fox News attracted 13.6 million viewers during the same event.   

CNN wasn’t the only left-wing media outlet that had struggles this year. MSNBC averaged 86,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic but outperformed CNN in total viewers with 806,000. Reports on Thursday revealed MSNBC requested pay cuts from anchors Joy Reid and Stephanie Ruhle to retain their roles, following a $5 million salary reduction for Rachel Maddow.  

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-expect-media-apologies-ever-for-the-duke-lacrosse-case

For the legacy media, the recent admission by Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the infamous 2006 Duke lacrosse case, that she had fabricated accusations of rape against three players on the university’s team, was at best a one-day story. While Mangum, a deeply troubled woman serving a long stretch at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women for killing a boyfriend five years after the Duke case, was clearly sincere in her contrition, opining on the podcast Let’s Talk with Kat that “saying that they raped me when they didn’t . . . was wrong” and “I made up a story that was wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” it hardly qualified as stop-the-presses news. That the allegation was false had long ago been established beyond question. The boys were fully exonerated and had reached a financial settlement with Duke for the school’s appalling response to the allegation. The hyper-ambitious rogue district attorney who in his zeal to nail them withheld key evidence of their innocence had been disgraced and disbarred.

So in that regard, it makes sense that in most accounts of the belated confession, it would come across as an out-of-the-blue footnote to a half-forgotten story, with a paragraph’s review of the case providing background for the uninitiated. The New York Times’s brief story, by Jenna West of The Athletic, does not even appear in the pages of the paper, just online.

In brief, the coverage conveyed not even a fleeting sense of what the Duke case meant at the time, how fully the story gripped the nation, dividing Americans by race and class; how, indeed, it anticipated much of what was to follow in the Trayvon Martin case; in Ferguson, Missouri; in the furious aftermath of the death of George Floyd; and, hardly least, in exposing the rot at the heart of two of America’s key institutions that has since become ever more apparent—academia and journalism.

All these years later, the media’s perfunctory coverage of Mangum’s admission is telling precisely because of what, given the calamitous mis-coverage of the original story, it so conspicuously lacks: self-awareness and accountability.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/20/study-most-cable-networks-coverage-of-trumps-cabinet-nominees-are-uniformly-negative/

A new study by a right-wing media watchdog group has found that the overwhelming majority of the coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees by major cable news channels has been “almost uniformly negative.”

As Fox News reports, the report was released by the Media Research Center (MRC), detailing the coverage of President-elect Trump’s personnel picks by ABC, CBS, and NBC. Within the timespan of December 1st to December 14th, Trump’s nominees – including FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard – received approximately 60 minutes and 47 seconds of coverage. Of this coverage, 96% was negative.

“Across all three networks, the coverage of Gabbard, Patel, and the handful of other nominees mentioned was entirely negative. Only Pete Hegseth, who received the lion’s share of the airtime, enjoyed a scant four positive evaluative statements, all of which cited his mother describing him as ‘redeemed’ and ‘a changed man,’” said MRC senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino in the report.

“To reiterate: the only positive commentary any Trump nominee received on the broadcast networks was from his own mother,” D’Agostino continued. “In addition to a whopping 96 percent negative tilt across their flagship evening newscasts, these networks also appear to have paid the most attention to Cabinet nominees who appeared to have the highest chances of sinking.”

Of the three channels, CBS spent the most time talking about President-elect Trump’s nominees, with just under 25 minutes; of those 25 minutes, 14 minutes were spent on Hegseth alone. Of that coverage, 96.7% was negative. NBC had the second-highest amount of coverage, with 21 minutes; 94.7% of their coverage was negative. ABC spent 19 minutes on the Cabinet nominees, with 90% of that coverage being negative.