RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/big-media-

Big Brother, in the person of President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was not persuaded by the findings of the Mueller investigation: “If there wasn’t active collusion proven, then I think what we have here is a case of passive collusion”. To put it another way, if President Trump is not guilty of being a Kremlin agent, in any technical, literal or actual sense, then he is still guilty. Former Director Clapper—along with former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director Comey—helped generate the Great Kremlin Conspiracy in the first place. Is there, then, a possibility that James Clapper might have a particular agenda in his strange response to the Mueller Report? Are we, perhaps, on the verge of uncovering one of the great scandals in American history, in which the intelligence agencies of the United States conspired to affect the course and consequences of a presidential election? Do not expect a media outfit such as CNN to take up the story—after all, James Clapper gave his reaction to the Mueller Report in his present capacity as CNN’s “National Security Analyst”. Big Media, regrettably, is no less invested in the Great Kremlin Conspiracy (2015–19) than Big Brother.   

Today, news and truth are like passing strangers. It was not supposed to be like this. The Walter Lippmann–John Dewey debate of the mid-twentieth century revolved around the question of whether the ordinary person could ever be expected to interpret meaningfully what was happening in the wider world. Dewey, in an optimistic liberal vein, believed it possible to educate Joe and Jane Citizen with the necessary wherewithal to be informed and insightful enough to make sense of the world for themselves. In contrast, Lippmann believed we were reliant on journalists and editors choosing objectivity over ideology and putting even-handedness before their own interests. That remains, however unlikely, freedom’s best hope.

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) was a sceptical—though not cynical—analysis of the problems of ordinary people exercising genuine democratic oversight of their governing class. The supposed purpose of the press and news media, as the Fourth Estate, was to make our political elite genuinely responsive to public opinion. This process, asserted Lippmann, was handicapped by the disjointedness and changeability of the untutored opinions of the public. There were, therefore, two interconnected problems that needed addressing for the health of a modern democracy. First, whatever the assertions of news agencies, facts invariably require interpretation (meaning anything from contextualisation to prioritisation or omission). Second, the modern world has become “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting” for the private citizen, bound by the limits of “subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental images”, to pursue meaningful interpretation without expert assistance. The role of the press and the news media, thus, was the “manufacture of public opinion”, an expression that in 1922 did not attract the opprobrium attached to it since the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s treatise on the mainstream media.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/ingraham-angle-promotes

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday June 10, 2019 hosted two so-called “reformist” Muslim women, Qanta Ahmed and Asra Nomani for a discussion of Christian persecution under Islam, which is a shameful, murderous pandemic. Neither woman could deal honestly with the Islamic, Sharia-based roots of this persecution, although certainly Ahmed was much more egregious in her dissimulation/ takiya. Hard data make plain “The Concordance of Sharia ‘Thirst’, Rampant Christian Persecution, and Jew-Hatred in Muslim Societies”. This juxtaposition reveals a striking concordance between Christian persecution by Muslims, the excess prevalence of extreme Antisemitic sentiments within Muslim societies, and Muslim attitudes favoring strict application of the Sharia.

Qanta Ahmed made these egregious pronouncements:

“It [Christian persecution] is also anathema to Islam that reveres Jesus [NO; he’s a Muslim prophet who destroys Christianity], that sees the Gospel as a holy book of God [No; deliberately corrupted version of the Koran]…Islam says everyone has a right to a free will, a right to reject Islam, to reject the truth of God [NO; per Koran 4:89, 2:217; 9:5; 9;29 & canonical hadith, “apostates” are to be killed; jihad to be waged to submit Jews & Christians to limited practice under Sharia jurisdiction if they survive]…So these Muslims are acting beyond the bounds”

She then goes on to extol Qatar for its alleged Catholic ecumenism, and the Kurds—chronic, mass murdering persecutors of Christians, past as prologue.

Asra Nomani was better, but her takiya can be almost as corrosive. She claimed mendaciously that Koran 1:7 is only hateful because of a “Wahhabi interpretation”. This verse in fact has a classical-cum-modern overwhelming (90%) interpretation across 13-centuries, Sunni and Shiite alike, I just carefully reviewed, and it curses the Jews for having incurred Allah’s anger [linking this verse to Koran 5:60, Jews as apes and pigs], and the Christians for having gone astray [linking Koran 1:7 to Koran 5:77]

Here is Asra Nomani, verbatim:

“Why is the cross under attack? It is because the Koran that I have here in the first chapter, the last sentence that we have [she means the Fatiha, Koran 1:6 to 1:7] , we say that we have to stay on the straight path [i.e., Islam] but [what] the Saudi interpretation and how governments like Qatar and Turkey have added is we have to stay on the straight path and not depart from it like the Jews and Christians have done They say that thinking of Jesus as a son of God is like polytheism and that is ultimately worse than murder they say. So that is why you have attacks on the symbol”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273925/american-president-london-bruce-bawer

Because my router was on the fritz during the first couple of days of the President’s state visit to the UK – a prelude to his Normandy visit on Friday marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day – I was forced to watch more TV coverage of the proceedings than would otherwise have been my wont. This meant relying heavily on CNN, the BBC, and Sky News. All of them were pretty much as snotty about Trump as expected, although the BBC did an especially obnoxious job, giving a ridiculous amount of airtime to some historian named Mark Shanahan, who in the guise of providing historical context and insight oozed anti-Trump – and anti-American – venom.

Since I’d never heard of Shanahan, I looked him up. He turned out to be an associate professor at the University of Reading, where one of his areas of specialization is “the celebritisation of American political culture from Eisenhower to Trump.” Shanahan brags on his university’s website about being “a regular media contributor to the BBC, ITN; CNN, Sky, ABC (Australia), France 24, and CTV (Canada).” During the Trump visit, no matter what the subject, he was ready with snark, both on the tube and on his Twitter feed. While Trump was visiting Westminster Abbey, Shanahan sneered that this would “play very well with American evangelicals at home.” Right, those American evangelicals who are into smoky thuribles, priests in red cassocks, and old Anglican anthems sung by boy choirs. Shanahan assured BBC viewers that Americans have an outdated “Mary Poppins” image of Britain, complete with bowler hats and chimney sweeps. Yeah, you’ve got it, Thucidydes, we’re all a bunch of dolts, who somehow slept through the Beatles, James Bond, Monty Python, the Thatcher era, Elton John, Ab Fab, Tony Blair, and all those horrible Hugh Grant romcoms. Shanahan also opined, with what seemed like at least a touch of antisemitism, that the “special relationship” is now a joke, because Trump cares less about US ties to the UK than to Israel.

Needless to say, Shanahan wasn’t alone. Pretty much every time the cable-news talking heads mentioned Trump, they found it necessary to repeat the word “controversial.”