RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/01/22/buzzfeed_the_covington_teens_and_the_harms_of_false_witness_139247.html

In the last week, two related media failures starkly revealed the endemic press credibility crisis that confronts our country. Far too many prominent media figures earnestly parrot distorted or patently false narratives so long as the group-think stories advance an agenda of “resistance” to President Trump and to the voters who galvanized our 2016 movement.

First, on Thursday night the media largely erupted with glee at BuzzFeed allegations that Robert Mueller possessed evidence that Trump suborned perjury, a claim forcefully discredited the next night by a rare public pronouncement from Mueller’s own team. Until that denial, MSNBC trumpeted the supposedly imminent impeachment of the president 97 times in one day. However, once the truth emerged, countless broadcasters and writers struggled with this grand unmasking of their inherent bias.

But help appeared – or so they thought. Video footage emerged that, initially, appeared to show a group of teenagers surrounding and intimidating an elderly Native American activist. Straight out of central casting, these young men were white, Catholic pro-lifers, and decked out in MAGA gear. Sensing an incredible opportunity to save face, the Trump-opposition advocates that populate most newsrooms leapt at this apparent validation: “See, they really are retrograde, racist hatemongers!”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272571/big-datas-alliance-big-media-threat-free-speech-daniel-greenfield

The media is dying. Read about it in the media.

Facebook is pumping $300 million into the media. And that’s after the Google News Initiative shoved $300 million into fighting “fake news” and helping struggling media outlets like the New York Times.

These aren’t investments. They’re charitable donations by Big Data to Big Brother.

Take Jeff Bezos taking $250 million, a little more than the $215 million he makes a day, and using it to buy the Washington Post, not because it’s a good business opportunity, but a good political one.

The media isn’t worth investing in.

TV and cable news are the weakest holdings of the entertainment giants. That’s why AT&T is none too fond of the CNN white elephant it’s stuck with.

John Stankey, Time Warner’s new boss (and therefore also CNN’s new overlord) told CNN that the news network has a “special social responsibility”. That’s the same rhetoric about public service that has the emerging giant monopolies subsidizing media companies as a charitable cause, not a profitable venture.

Journalism is deader than disco. The shambling monster still squealing about the First Amendment while pressuring social media companies to censor its conservative opposition under the guise of a Russian conspiracy theory has as much to do with journalism as Nabisco’s ad agency or Biden’s spokesman do.

The media doesn’t report the news. It reposts tweets, recycles news stories from a handful of wire services and largely relies on outside interests to do its actual reporting for it. Sometimes that means outside hit pieces covertly embedded, like Fusion GPS’ Russian Trump conspiracy theory, other times it’s more openly financed, like NPR getting $100K from a pro-Iran deal group to report on the Iran deal.

Media once stood for the multiple mediums, print, radio and television, which required expensive infrastructure and allowed major corporations to reach a national audience with its mass media.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272636/lefts-smirking-maga-kid-hoax-matthew-vadum

A video posted online over the weekend showing a teenaged Trump supporter’s awkward reaction to having his personal space aggressively invaded by a loud left-wing agitator sparked a leftist-led social media meltdown that will not soon be forgotten.

Nick Sandmann, a student from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, was at the Lincoln Memorial Friday after attending this year’s March for Life.

Sandmann, a white, male, heterosexual, pro-life, Catholic Trump supporter wearing a red pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” baseball cap was a perfect target for the nation’s howling outrage brigades.

Video showed an elderly Indian man named Nathan Phillips, who turns out to be a radical left-wing activist, getting too close for comfort to Sandmann who at times stared back at him or grinned. The videos of varying durations that surfaced of the encounter all show the same thing. Sandmann simply stood there and took the abuse, which consisted in part of having a drum pounded loudly in his face, from Phillips without responding. Phillips later lied to reporters about the incident and called the high school kids “beasts.” He also said, “It was racism. It was hatred. It was scary.”

Of course, it was none of those things, but getting a leftist to abandon his narrative is generally an impossible task.

Black radicals also participated in the incident at one of America’s most sacred spaces, yelling abuse at Sandmann and his classmates who responded with pep cheers. Leftists claimed the schoolchildren chanted “build the wall” as some kind of a racist insult but it never happened according to video footage.

Sandmann’s pleasant demeanor was taken by some to be an affront to Phillips, who claims to have served in the U.S. military at some indefinite point in the past.

But because Sandmann is a living embodiment of everything today’s Left’s despises –whites, males, straights, Catholics, and especially Trump supporters— somehow the young man’s remarkably restrained, mature posture turned into a threat to the republic in the minds of leftists.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/call-out-conservatives

When I first started writing for National Review in 2015, Nick Frankovich was my editor. He always was kind and professional, offering advice on how I could develop my nascent writing style. Although we never met in person, he appeared to be cautious and reserved. I know he is a man of deep faith and very devoted to the magazine William F. Buckley, Jr. founded in 1955.

So it seemed way out of character for Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.

“They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.

On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.

That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.

Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.

But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/a_new_low_at_the_new_york_times.html

Martin Luther King was a noble man whose courage shattered the ceiling of racism in America. It is disgraceful that too many bigots and charlatans cloak themselves in his legacy to promote hatred. The latest example is a written tantrum, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” by Michelle Alexander, who became a New York Times columnist in 2018.

Start with rote libel:

Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel’s political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

“Well documented power” of the Jewish lobby are well known code words to evoke fantasies about surreptitious Jewish manipulation of politics.

Alexander then brings in brings in Martin Luther King with the following:

Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. … And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

Occupation of Gaza? Huh? All Jewish residents of the Gaza strip were removed in 2005. They left behind state-of-the-art, productive farms; agricultural equipment including tractors, greenhouses, fertilizers, and tools; and lovely homes bought for the Arabs by two American Jewish philanthropists. The local Arabs trashed and destroyed every single remnant of Jewish life. And they escalated persistent rocket attacks against civilian towns in Israel.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/sharia-and-censorship.html

It is virtual common knowledge that the tech giants – Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other, smaller “free expression” Internet platforms, such as Patreon – are engaged in a concerted, partnered campaign to erase “hate speech” from the public discussion of speech. That is, they disagree with what is said about certain individuals, issues, or entities, and wish people to remain ignorant of what others may say or that opposition may exist to what the MSM may say. Especially taboo is any criticism of Islam, whether it’s a scholarly essay or expressing a fear of Islam (“Islamophobia”).

The censorship amounts to compliance with Islamic Sharia law.That these tech giants are in cahoots with Muslims who want to impose speech-quashing Sharia law should be no surprise to readers. Robert Spencer has published an article on Jihad Watch and Front Page about the cozy relationship between Facebook, Twitter, and CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations).

Now it is becoming clear why Facebook and Twitter have for so long been harassing, shadowbanning, and blocking foes of jihad terror and Sharia oppression. Journalist Jordan Schachtel revealed in Conservative Review Tuesday that “the Hamas-tiedCouncil on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is best known as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history, appears to have access to high-ranking Facebook and Twitter executives and has communicated with these individuals about who should be allowed to stay on their platforms.”

https://quadrant.org.au/

There’s a newsroom term, “re-topping”, which means changing the first few paragraphs to include the latest facts and, as inky sorts say, “advance the story.” Yesterday’s big yarn, just now being re-topped all over the world, was a beaut: according to Buzzfeed, the outlet which first aired the confected Trump-Russiagate dossier compiled by a Washington lobbying outfit paid by Hillary’s Clinton’s presidential campaign, “two sources” had confirmed that Donald Trump instructed former attorney Michael Cohen to lie under oath. This information was said to be in special counsel Mueller’s hands and would likely lead to the president’s impeachment.

If you are inclined to believe Mr Trump is the spawn of Satan and takes his riding instructions directly from the Kremlin, it was a bombshell. At the ABC, where there are no conservatives nor, apparently, experienced senior editors to restrain the leftist gusto of a groupthink newsroom, it became the day’s big story.

The same confirmation bias was also evident at the former Fairfax comics, now part of Nine, where early on Saturday afternoon the headline and blurb reproduced atop this post continued to preside over the home page.

Trouble is, the story wasn’t true and the source denying it was no less that Mueller himself, which suggests the Buzzfeed report was very, very wrong indeed. Throughout the so-called Russiagate investigation, Team Mueller has maintained a near-monastic silence on the progress or otherwise of its diggings and delvings. That it broke that silence to refute Buzzfeed’s bogus scoop is an indictment in itself.

How did the ABC and Fairfax react to the denial of the story they loved so much, a denial which first hit the wires in the wee hours of Saturday morning?

At the ABC, the initial report was re-topped, eventually, with word of Mueller’s disavowal. After that, the original story, with its references to “bombshells”, quotes from foaming Trump critics and charting of what readers were led to believe was the path to near-certain impeachment, well that was allowed to stand. It is almost as if some news-editing backbencher decided the old and wrong story was just too good to take down and spike, which is what should happen to reports that simply aren’t true. Unless there is an outbreak of old-fashioned journalistic rigour at the ABC, that bizarre re-topped blend of opening paragraphs denying everything follows, and at great length, can still be read here.

We live in an age in which irreversible character assassination is a public entertainment, the slanderers being for the most part well-bred, well-paid, intelligent and enjoying the tacit backing of social-media giants Facebook and Twitter. They raise lynch mobs in 140 characters and have established a worldwide Reich wholly antithetical to the freedoms of speech, thought and association.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, the showman Phineas T. Barnum used to declare about his invention, the “publicity stunt”. His logic was simple: the adhesiveness of the person’s name would cling to the public’s memory-cells long after the event that originally lodged it there had vanished. That, however, was before the conjuncture of social media and the internet had rendered the concept of forgetfulness as extinct as the toeless sloth. Together, the venom of Twitter/Facebook and the utter eternity of the web can today destroy a person’s good name as long as Halley’s Comet circles the Milky Way. Anyone caught in the jaws of social media’s 3 a.m. drunken abuse and the perpetual ubiquity of the internet is henceforth forever vulnerable, beyond the protections of memory loss, statutes of limitations or libel laws.

There are a couple of other ingredients to this mix that increase its lethality. The first is that the victim should be a foe of the liberal-left nexus of doctrinaire feminism, pseudo-egalitarianism and liberal-leftism. The second is that it helps if the proposed victim inadvertently steps a little out of line.

Believe me, I know.

Just over a year ago, my editors of the Irish edition of the Sunday Times of London asked me to write a piece about the pay differential between men and women in the BBC. Doing a background check, I noted that the two best-paid women in the BBC were Jewish. I was (and remain) one of the most fervent supporters of Israel in the Irish media, and I have long been both an admirer of the Jewish people and an amateur student of their many achievements. (These, by the way, include the first tank, Dassault aircraft, independent suspension, penicillin, streptomycin, the anti-polio jab, oh yes, and the Old Testament.) I admit that I clumsily strayed into what others might regard as anti-Semitic territory when I genuinely congratulated these two women:

Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder: who are their agents? If they’re the same ones that negotiated the pay for the women on the lower scales, then maybe the latter have found their true value in the market place.

The only query that my column elicited from the Sunday Times was whether I was certain they were Jewish. I replied I was.

Shortly after midnight, just minutes after my column appeared, someone in London began to tweet about my “anti-Semitic rant” through the sewer that is social media, and this gathered pace exponentially. While I slept, my career was effectively ended, and shortly after I woke I was publicly sacked by the Sunday Times editor without him even speaking to me. Over the next twenty-four hours, my reputation as perhaps the most stalwart friend of Israel in the Irish media and a repeated attester to the full horrors of the Final Solution was completely turned on its head.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272565/newsweeks-nina-burleigh-problem-ari-lieberman

Newsweek has a serious problem and it’s called Nina Burleigh. Burleigh, who despises Trump and maintains left-wing ideological proclivities, covers national politics for Newsweek. But on January 14, Burleigh distinguished herself in another way. She revealed herself to be a rabid conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite to boot. Credit for the discovery goes to prolific blogger Aussie Dave from the blog Israellycool.

A twitter post by left-wing ideologue Sarah Kendzior prompted Burleigh’s bizarre conspiracy-riddled post. Kendzior expressed a desire to write a “thread of articles” on the “massive and horrific crimes that have been carried out with impunity by people in Trump’s camp…” That comment elicited the following disturbing response from Burleigh; “Israel, mossad, Chabad and black cube…you’re hitting the third rail of American journalism, Sarah.”

Headquartered in Crown Heights Brooklyn, Chabad is an orthodox Hassidic sect known for its outreach programs and message of inclusivity. But according to Newsweek’s national politics correspondent, Chabad along with the State of Israel, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and Black Cube (a privately owned Israeli risk-consulting company) are the sources of “massive and horrific crimes that have been carried out with impunity by people in Trump’s camp.” In the conspiracy-laden world of Burleigh, a cabal of Jews or Jewish-related entities is conspiring with Trump and his team to inflict “massive and horrific crimes.” Such malevolent opinions are similar in tone and content to those found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th century anti-Semitic forgery, which finds receptive audiences among the hard-left and radical right and throughout the Muslim world.