RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/25/media-wolves

During his fierce news conference last Wednesday, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson blasted the accomplices who publicly validated Jussie Smollett’s bogus claim that he was attacked last month by two white Trump supporters.

“To make things worse, the accusations within this phony attack received national attention for weeks,” said the chief. “Celebrities, news commentators, and even presidential candidates weighed in on something that was choreographed by an actor.”

Chicago media won plaudits for their coverage of the hoax: Local reporters, gifted with finely tuned bullshit detectors from covering the cutthroat world of Chicago politics each day, remained skeptical as the story unfolded, refusing to be suckered like their counterparts in the national media were.

Johnson’s condemnations—combined with the fact that Chicago reporters were applauded for the mere fact of doing their jobs correctly—starkly illustrate the cultural and political crisis now engulfing the country: The legacy media’s instant legitimization of scoundrels, insofar as the sympathetic subject plays the foil to Donald Trump.

Every huckster, hoaxster, swindler, cheater, publicity hound, and flat-out liar immediately earns rock-star status as long as the charlatan offers the confirmation bias that Trump haters need in order to prove their twisted and unsubstantiated conclusions about the president.

Victim of a nonexistent hate crime? Corrupt law enforcement official? Sniveling congressman with laughable tales about the Ruskies?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/25/stop_earning_the_enemy_of_the_people_label_139569.html
Media figures regularly shriek in protest whenever President Trump besmirches the press as “the enemy of the people.” The phrase is jarring, no doubt. But here’s an idea: The leaders in the Fourth Estate should quit behaving in ways that lend credence to the president’s caustic complaint. Just this past Friday, three at MSNBC, the Daily Beast, and HBO proved themselves fully deserving of Trump’s denunciation.

First, Michael Steele, a regular MSNBC contributor and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, appeared on that network with host Nicole Wallace, former communications director for George W. Bush. These two erstwhile conservative commentators prove that the cable news lights shine brightly for establishment Republicans willing to devote their professional lives to deranged disparagement of a president with the most conservative record since Ronald Reagan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smollett-hoaxers-11550795374

If you are wondering why the President of the United States took time Thursday to fire off a tweet about the Jussie Smollett case, the answer should be obvious: Mr. Smollett was soaking up the media’s attention this week. That said, the Smollett hoax is instructive—not for what it says about President Trump’s Twitter habits, not even for what it says about Jussie Smollett, but for what it reveals about the practices and social mind-set of the country’s primary media outlets.

Since January, this country has experienced two media bonfires—over Covington Catholic’s high school students and now Jussie Smollett—whose common element is the reflexive judgment that much of American society is irredeemably bigoted.

The first incident occurred on the National Mall between students from Covington, Ky., and a Native American drummer. Within minutes of a video emerging of Nicholas Sandmann smiling into the face of Nathan Phillips, the media—newspapers, TV and social media—erupted with condemnation of the teenager. Mr. Sandmann was also wearing a MAGA cap, which for much of the media now seems to be de facto proof of multiple anti-social phobias.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-new-york-timess-islamic-flimflam-man/

On February 18, in keeping with its apparent goal of remaining America’s most reliable source of pro-Islamic propaganda, the New York Times ran yet another op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, who seems to be replacing Tariq Ramadan (who is currently in jail awaiting trial for raping two women) not only as the Times’s house dissembler on Islam (since 2013, he has held the title of contributing opinion writer) but, more broadly, as the leading personification of “modern Islam” or “moderate Islam” in the West.

Last November, the Times published a piece by Akyol entitled “True Islam Does Not Kill Blasphemers.” Anyone who is even a patchy awareness of Islam knows just how dishonest a claim this is; as Robert Spencer dryly observed at the time, “if Akyol denied the death penalty for blasphemy in any Sharia state, he could end up being executed for blasphemy himself.”

In keeping with his practice of blatantly lying about his faith and its adherents, Akyol’s latest Times piece was headlined “The Creeping Liberalism in American Islam.” It began as follows:

Since 9/11, a recurrent theme in the far-right circles of America has been “creeping Shariah.” It reflects the fear that Islamic law will silently spread through the land of freedom to ultimately overtake it — to put all women in burqas and all adulterers to death.

Implicit here is that such concerns are outrageous and that only an extremist – a member of the “far right” – would profess them. Never mind that as the number of Muslims in Western Europe has proliferated, so have burkas. Never mind that it’s a core tenet of Islam that adulterers – like blasphemers – must be put to death. Akyol continues:

In this scenario, American Muslims, who make up only 1 percent of the population, will pursue this grand scheme because they are here not for freedom and opportunity, but to form a fifth column in it, as Steve Bannon seriously claimed in 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272912/jussie-smollett-hoax-and-medias-tribal-war-america-daniel-greenfield

Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago.

These days the media isn’t biased. It’s tribal.

Bias leads us to make mistakes. But the media wasn’t making a mistake when it loudly broadcast false claims with plenty of red flags about Trump supporters wearing red hats. Just as the media wasn’t making a mistake when it spread fake news about attacks on Muslim women by Trump supporters after the election. This wasn’t an error due to prejudice, but an active effort to reinforce tribal prejudices.

The Covington Catholic story in particular was not newsworthy by any rational definition of the term. The media insisted on making it news because it perfectly encapsulated the tribal prejudices of its base of urban and suburban lefties by pitting anti-abortion kids in MAGA hats against saintly minorities.

There’s another example of tribal hatred masquerading as news in the news now.

Prime Time Sports, a small sports memorabilia store in a Colorado Springs mall, announced that it was going out of business. Malls are emptying out across the country and there was no reason why the closing of a mall shop selling Cubs t-shirts and Patriots mini-helmets should have ended up in hundreds of papers around the country. But the reason why its closing ended up in major papers and news networks, including CNN. says a great deal about the malicious nature of political tribalism on the Left.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/why-does-the-msm-keep-falling-for-obvious-hoaxes/

This is just sad:

The national outrage that simmered after actor Jussie Smollett said he was attacked by people shouting racial and anti-gay slurs was fueled in part by celebrities who spoke out loud and strong on social media.

But the outrage has now been replaced by surprise, doubt and bafflement as the singers, actors and politicians who came out in support of the “Empire” star struggle to digest the strange twists the case has taken. Some conservative pundits, meanwhile, have gleefully seized on the moment.

The narrative that just a week ago seemed cut-and-dry has become messy and divisive — and it’s all playing out again on social media.

If there was a “national outrage” over the dubious incident, it was limited to gullible left-wing journalists, celebrities, politicians and activists.

The “narrative” only seemed “cut-and-dry” to people who were looking at the case through lenses clouded by their anti-Trump bias. It seemed made-up to those of us who noticed that Smollett’s allegations were outlandish, implausible and riddled with inconsistencies from the get-go.

Yet even as his story started falling apart (which happened almost immediately), the national media clung to their precious narrative.

https://pjmedia.com/video/how-the-media-failed-again-on-the-jussie-smollett-hoax/

Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s weeks-long reign as (liberal) America’s intersectional sweetheart came to an inglorious end this weekend when it was revealed in multiple reports that he paid his two Nigerian pals to stage a fake hate crime against him last month in Chicago.

Many (perhaps most) Americans from the beginning suspected that Smollett tried to manufacture a hate crime to make Trump supporters look bad. But not the Mainstream media. They fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

You would think that after falling for “tribal elder” Nathan Phillips’ dubious claims, last month — to the point of being legally culpable — the media would be a bit more circumspect.

But no. When presented with another enticing opportunity to demonize Trump supporters, they jumped like Pavlov’s dogs at the chance.

TMZ broke the original version of the story late last month in a report alleging that Smollett was the victim of a vicious hate crime:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/jussie-smollett-lawyers-up-hires-michael-cohens-lawyer-after-persons-of-interest-released/

Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” actor who claims he was assaulted by white supremacists screaming “MAGA COUNTRY” in the middle of a polar vortex in Chicago, just hired the best defense lawyer in town, Michael Monico, after the two persons of interest in the case were released by the Chicago Police Department.The two persons of interest that Smollett claimed were his attackers in an interview on ABC with Robin Roberts turned out to be Nigerian actors who have connections to the “Empire” show.