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MEDIA

Leftist Media Can’t Hide Their Racism Against Black Republicans The left despises successful black Republicans, not only because they win elections but because they refute the lie that America is a “systemically racist” and evil country. By David Keltz

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/13/leftist-media-cant-hide-their-racism-against-black-republicans/

n the eyes of the leftist media, the only thing worse than being a black Republican is being a black Republican who chooses to run for office.

Just look at their despicable treatment of recent presidential candidates, including the late Herman Cain, Dr. Ben Carson, Larry Elder, and Senator Tim Scott.

When Cain ran for the presidency in 2012, the media peddled unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment, just as they did to Justice Clarence Thomas—another one of their favorite targets—and Brett Kavanaugh for that matter.

When Dr. Ben Carson, who happens to have been one of the world’s top neurosurgeons and a God-fearing Christian, ran for president in 2016, his faith was routinely mocked, and his biography—particularly his upbringing—was questioned by the media in ways that Barack Obama’s never was—even though it turns out Obama’s supposed memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” was almost entirely a work of fiction.

Typically, the leftist media has no problem covering a white Republican who they consider a threat to their power because they can gleefully, without a shred of evidence, call him or her a “white supremacist” or a neo-nazi.

One might think a black Republican would be harder to label in such a farcical way.

But apparently for Larry Elder, the affable radio host, that was no longer the case. When Elder decided to run for Governor of California in 2021 in a recall election to unseat the wildly unpopular pro-lockdown policies of Gavin Newsom, the Los Angeles Times disgracefully referred to him as “the Black face of white supremacy.”

Evidently, so long as a mostly white newsroom dispatches a person of color to slander a fellow minority, it’s fair game.

The Media Directive Is Clear: Israel Can Do Only Wrong By Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-media-directive-is-clear-israel-can-do-only-wrong/

This weekend something quite surprising and wonderful happened, for a change: In a brilliantly daring and well-coordinated rescue, commandos from Israel’s counterterrorism unit, Yamam, raided two buildings in Gaza on Saturday morning and retrieved four hostages taken on October 7 — alive and well. In an eerie echo of the heroics displayed by the Israelis at Entebbe in 1976, they suffered only one casualty, that of Arnon Zmora, who died of wounds sustained while leading his extraction team on their successful mission.

Most media attention has focused on the return of young Noa Argamani, whose abduction — livestreamed by cheering GoPro-wearing jihadis — was one of the most traumatic videos from that day; the images of her reunited with her family were thus among the most moving from this weekend. But for those familiar with Hamas’s brutal hostage calculus, the rescue of the three men — Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv — unharmed is in many ways even more miraculous. (Kozlov popped the collar on his polo shirt as he stepped off the rescue transport, which is exactly what I’d be doing if I’d spent the last eight months expecting to be shot in the head execution-style yet walked away unscathed.)

You might have thought that all this was cause for celebration. You are of course a benighted fool to think that, and likely a moral monster as well. For it seems our betters in the media, as well as the keening mobs online, are here to tell us that the rescue of these hostages was in fact a tragedy if not an outright war crime. Hamas immediately claimed over 200 civilians dead — as spurious and invented as all “official” Hamas death tolls, but the peg upon which they correctly expected Western media to hang their coverage. Then, like clockwork, the story became not about the miraculous rescue but the supposedly horrifying human cost of it.

The Daily Beast’s Wahajat Ali lamented, “Is killing more than 200 Palestinian civilians worth 4 Israeli hostages? A question worth asking on the record.” (Not asked on the record: What were those 4 hostages doing in Gaza?) Others lamented the death of Palestine Chronicle journalist Abdallah Aljamal — killed senselessly while reading his Koran at home during the raid, merely because he was holding three Israeli men captive there. The Washington Post led the way in the media, with the headline “More than 200 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Hostage Raid in Gaza” and a subheading describing it as a “brazen” attack that “unleashed relentless bombardment” in the Nuseirat refugee camp — the story as told from Hamas’s point of view. That freakishly inverted moral framing was everywhere. A pair of CNN headlines told you everything about whom they believed and whose side they were on: (1) “Yesterday marked Gaza’s deadliest day in 6 months, Palestinian health ministry says,” (2) “Israel alleges journalist held hostages in Gaza, without providing evidence.” (They have since provided reams of it.)

‘Jaws’ Out of Water? Veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss gives the USA an intriguing – and brave – civics lesson. by Thom Nickels

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jaws-out-of-water/

The shark in the movie Jaws is alive and well, but instead of attacking innocent ocean swimmers, it is going after woke ideologues in out-of-water venues.

Recently, the Cabot Theater in Beverly, Massachusetts, managed by J. Casey Seward, hosted a Jaws symposium Q-and-A with Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss. Hundreds of people attended the event, no doubt thinking it was going to be a superficial conversation on Jaws movie nostalgia.

That changed when Dreyfuss walked onstage in a blue floral print house-dress, sashaying and wiggling his hips before the audience after which stagehands then rushed forward to remove the dress and help him put on a sports jacket.

The woman-to-man skit was more sophomoric, self-indulgent SNL-fare than genuinely funny. But it was certainly not a transphobic skit worthy of the attention it received from the progressive, left-tainted mainstream press.

Yet many media outlets “exploded” with sensationalistic breaking news headlines. It was as if Dreyfuss had been found guilty of infanticide. What media outlet didn’t jump into the act? There was Vanity Fair, AOL News, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Blade, as well as hundreds of TV news stations across the country, like WCVB-5 Boston.

Most posted videos of Dreyfuss walking onstage in that tacky house dress. And they followed the actor—dressed as a man—as he sat down with the host of the interview, a short, diminutive woman with an NPR-style, feminist buzz cut, who looked more than a little nervous as she immediately started talking about the award-winning movie, ignoring what had just happened onstage.

In online videos of the Cabot event, what’s noticeable is intense audience applause and enthusiastic appreciation. While media reports stated there were boos from some in the audience from the start, those boos were so soft they were drowned out by the cheers and clamor of approval.

Yes, yes, okay…one can hear a few disgruntled groans when Dreyfuss tells the audience that civics needs to make a comeback in America’s public schools.

Dreyfuss, who founded the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative in 2006, then urged audience members to “make sure your kids are not the last generation of Americans. And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Here we have a purely patriotic comment that should not be controversial at all—unless, of course, you’re a Howard Zinn fan and want American history rewritten with a Marxist slant.

Saying you favor civics classes in public schools is a mild-mannered conservative talking point, but to woke folks it can trigger something like an epileptic seizure. In fact, many of the “offenses” that Dreyfuss was claimed to have uttered on the Cabot stage were not recorded on video at all, which strikes me as odd considering all the news attention this “story” generated.

The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids? Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-7-the-campus-kill-the-jews-riots-paid-professional-agitators-funded-by-democratic-big-wigs-or-well-meaning-kids

Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question. At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.”).

The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible. But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

Several news organizations have been doing serious digging to get to the bottom of this. In this post I’ll highlight the work of three of them:

The New York Post, which has had a story on this subject nearly every day for the past week and more. Examples include a May 1 piece by Olivia Land (“Notorious anti-Israel protester Lisa Fithian, paid $300 a day to teach activists, spotted among Columbia rioters”); a May 2 piece by Joe Marino, Craig McCarthy and Emily Crane (“Nearly half of anti-Israel protesters arrested at Columbia, City College weren’t students: police”); and a May 5 piece by Chris Nesi (“Radical anti-Israel nonprofit urged rampaging Columbia occupiers to recreate BLM ‘summer of 2020’ riots”);

Tablet, with a piece by Park MacDougald on May 6 (“The People Setting America on Fire: An investigation into the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests”); and

Politico, with a piece by Shia Kapos on May 5 (“Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors”).

Death to Facts: Northwestern journalism prof Steven Thrasher tells pro-Palestinian demonstrators to reject objective reporting –

https://wirepoints.org/death-to-facts-northwestern-journalism-prof-steven-thrasher-speaks-at-pro-palestinian-demonstration-rejecting-objective-reporting-wirepoints/

In a speech Saturday to protesters at Northwestern University, Professor Steven Thrasher of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism endorsed the worst of what’s wrong in journalism today. “To the Medill students and journalists within earshot, I say to you: Our work is not about objectivity,” he said. “Our work is about you putting your brilliant minds to work and opening your compassionate hearts.” The speech is reported here by The Daily Northwestern and Thrasher’s full text is here.

Thrasher, and far too many in prominent positions in journalism, have long rejected the traditional goal of reporting unbiased facts. Instead, they say, reporters should promote narratives about what they believe is social justice. It’s called “advocacy journalism,” or, to critics, “woke journalism.” Three years ago, nationally recognized law professor Jonathan Turley summarized the trend this way:

Thrasher’s view of journalism is spreading among top schools. We have been writing about the assault on foundational concepts of neutrality in journalism in academia. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories.

The Expansion of Taxpayer-Subsidized “Journalism” It’s not just NPR or PBS. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-expansion-of-taxpayer-subsidized-journalism/

One of the things I spent the last ten years warning about was that the leftist propaganda messaging system we call the media was…

1. Failing economically

2. Transitioning to nonprofit and otherwise government-subsidized status

… at some point, other conservatives will realize what’s going on when it becomes obvious enough, but for now it’s an issue that virtually nobody is paying attention to even as Republican Senate and House members continue to sponsor bills providing special tax benefits to local media outlets.

New York however is the first state in the nation to make it official.

The state budget, set to be finalized Saturday, includes the nation’s first payroll tax credit for local news organizations in a bid to encourage new hiring amid the ongoing struggles of journalism outlets to cover their communities.

“A thriving local news industry is vital to the health of our democracy,” bill sponsor Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Manhattan Democrat, said in a statement. “It’s our responsibility to help ensure New Yorkers have access to independent and community-focused journalism.”

There’s virtually no such thing as independent journalism anymore and when Democrats say “protecting democracy”, they mean promoting party propaganda while smearing political opponents.

The current malignancy of America’s Fourth Estate. The mainstream fake news media. Victor Sharpe

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/

The death of a dynamic and independent free press begins when the mainstream media becomes a propaganda organ for a government. And it was during the Obama regime’s eight long malign years that this process reached its nadir. Now, under Obama’s protégé and current President, Joe Biden, the malignancy continues unabated.

Perhaps the media was once considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long now, the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead a disseminator of leftwing Democrat Party propaganda.

The dread examples of disinformation and misinformation were seen during the last century of Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes, but it now increasingly pollutes our own mainstream media (MSM).

The alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN – are unapologetic shills for an increasingly leftwing Democrat party. Newspapers share the same guilt. The New York Times and the Washington Post leading the way in a baleful charge.

It was our 18th century President, Thomas Jefferson, who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become the present demise of a free and vital press. He said:

“If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter.”

The Price of Surrendering Speech By Eliot Pattison

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/the_price_of_surrendering_speech.html

No one was particularly surprised when Vladmir Putin recently won reelection by a landslide. The near universal reaction could be characterized by a roll of the eyes and a sighed “what do you expect, it’s Russia.” We’ve seen this before, after all — it is his fifth term — but there is something new in its significance for us. What’s changed is the newly fragile condition of our own democracy, making the Moscow “election” emphatically relevant to America. Many are the differences between Russian and American society, but one of those gaps has shrunk with alarming speed over the past decade. Putin’s power has been built on the bones of a free press. America once had a fiercely independent media that was not just the hallmark of our liberty but also the guardian that kept our society free. But our mainstream press has abandoned its sentinel post, leaving America vulnerable as we move toward the most important election in generations. 

The Supreme Court recently cast a spotlight on the health of our free speech when it examined the Administration’s efforts to stifle critics through manipulation of social media. Reports on the hearing, however, missed the fundamental issue. Apologists asserted that there had been no top-down coercion of speech — “nothing to see here, move on.” But the ultimate issue wasn’t that the Administration initiated censorship, it was that our leaders were enabled by the repression of speech that was already endemic in the popular media. The Supreme Court will decide if indirect manipulations violate constitutional protections. Whatever the outcome, we are learning a bitter lesson: the Constitution, in all its brilliance, does not protect us from repression that grows outside government, from within our culture. Free speech relies on the Constitution, yes, but it also relies on our social compact and its moral framework of truth, which is collapsing in vital parts of society.  

Our mainstream media has been surrendering its freedom for years, not by any dictate from the top but by a seismic shift in its values and self-perceived role in society. The process started slowly, long ago, when publishers and editors discovered a gold mine in obsessing over celebrity heroes, then accelerated when they found that a celebrity villain offered the same rewards. They learned to favor sensation over substance, never worried that their chosen villains are not always evil, nor their heroes always virtuous. For them an off-color remark or over-the-top boast from one of their celebrities becomes more important than any substantive dialogue about policy. Why worry about terrorists infiltrating across the border when what the public really wants to hear is how the President blasted the “Neanderthals” who don’t embrace his climate agenda? Thus began the dumbing down of their readers. They taught their increasingly shallow audience that political engagement had nothing to do with liberty or constitutional government, but was simply about loving to hate the villain of choice.

NPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/18/npr_scandal_should_kill_taxpayer-funded_broadcasting_150810.html

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?

There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.

Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.

Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

In True Journalistic Fashion, NPR Can’t Take What It Dishes Out

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/17/in-true-journalistic-fashion-npr-cant-take-what-it-dishes-out/

Has there ever been a more hypocritically thin-skinned occupation than journalism?

Day after day these relatively uneducated writers piously dish out opprobrium on those they don’t like and then respond like whiny spoiled brats when anyone dares to criticize them.

The latest example of this involves Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio who we learned on Tuesday was suspended without pay for having the temerity to complain that this taxpayer-supported enterprise had become hopelessly agenda-driven.

Berliner has worked at NPR for a quarter century and describes himself as a Sarah Lawrence College-educated child of a “lesbian peace activist mother” whose Spotify “listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.”

In other words, he’s a solid liberal. So, it’s worth listening to what he has to say.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” he writes, “but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed.”

That culture no longer exists, he says, a transformation that started in earnest in 2016.

“What began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he writes. He goes on to describe how the network’s ideological blinders caused it to swallow the Russia-hoax story whole, mishandle the COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop stories, and how woke dogma infects everything NPR covers.