RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/The-White-House-is-at-war-with-reporters-but-13199382.php

President Trump’s sustained war on the news media is loud and destructive and surely must be the worst, most unprecedented attack on the Fourth Estate in modern history.

Not so fast. On a few significant fronts, Trump is following a trail blazed by President Obama in undermining openness and press freedom. And Trump’s newfound willingness to use the Justice Department to surveil journalists and sniff out their sources is right out of the Obama playbook.

Meanwhile, the tweets keep coming. “If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all,” Trump tweeted recently.Since taking office, Trump has had only one, full-length press conference at the White House. His own legal and administrative headaches probably preclude a repeat performance any time soon.

Drawing the most attention are Trump’s darker pronouncements — journalists are “nasty,” they are “enemies of the people,” and maybe some should see their licenses revoked. Journalist Ken Vogel of the New York Times is one of several to receive chilling death threats, apparently from Trump supporters.

“You are the enemy of the people,” a caller said on voicemail shared by Vogel last week. “And although the pen might be mightier than the sword, the pen is not mightier than the AK-47.”

Trump recently escalated from trash-talk to legal action, deploying the Justice Department to seize without notice six years’ worth of email and phone records from four reporters in order to smoke out a source whose information reflected badly on Trump.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271221/iran-orders-7-journalists-flogged-media-yawns-daniel-greenfield

Remember all that media outrage over President Trump’s criticism of its fake news operation?

That’s the same media that is constantly doing unpaid ads for Iran’s nuclear program and its plot to take over Yemen (every story attacking US participation in the “Saudi coalition” and fake news claims about “atrocities” committed against the Shiite Jihadis of the Houthis).

The media claims that Trump’s criticism endangers it. Meanwhile it seems far less interested in Iran’s abuses of journalists.

Iranian courts in July and August sentenced at least six journalists affiliated with Majzooban-e-Noor, a news website that focuses on the Gonabadi Dervish religious order, and a journalist from the state-run outlet Ensaf, to prison terms of between seven and 26 years, and ordered them to be flogged publicly and forced into exile and banned from political and social media activities on their eventual releases, according to news reports and rights organizations.

“These horrifying sentences lay bare Iranian authorities’ depraved attitude toward journalists, as well as the hollow center of President Hassan Rouhani’s promises of reform,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour from Washington, D.C. “Iran should end its vicious campaign against journalists, and allow them to report freely.”

Imagine if the media covered this the way it fulminates over Trump’s criticisms of CNN. But of course it doesn’t. Its claims that it cares about journalism (and its even more bizarre claims that Trump’s criticisms endanger journalists abroad) have always been as fake as its news.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/you-are-not-going-to-believe-this-list-of-cnns-bungled-reporting/

Donald Trump has been on a tear against the media in recent days, calling out most major media outlets for “lies,” “fake news,” and “phony news.” But the president has reserved his worst venom for CNN, which has been caught in what he is calling a “lie” that the network won’t retract.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @carlbernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News

Last month, CNN reported based on anonymous sources that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was willing to testify that Mr. Trump knew in advance that Donald Trump Jr. was going to meet with Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton — a claim that the president and his son both vehemently deny.

However in the past week, one of the sources — Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis — admitted that he didn’t know that this was true, and his client told federal prosecutors under oath as part of a plea deal that he didn’t know that, either.

In addition, Mr. Davis was identified by name in CNN’s story as having no comment on the report — a lie given what he now says.

Seems pretty cut and dried. If Bernstein isn’t lying, why won’t he admit his error?

CNN has had plenty of other opportunities to admit they made mistakes. The Daily Caller compiled 20 of them:

CNN retracted a story in June of 2016 claiming that former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation by Congress for his alleged ties to Russia.

The story relied on one anonymous congressional source and CNN apologized to Scaramucci for the error. Three CNN reporters ended up resigning from the company over the botched report.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271169/banned-twitterstan-mark-tapson

Bosch Fawstin is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist, the creator of The Infidel series featuring his anti-jihadist superhero Pigman, and the winner of the 2015 AFDI Mohammad Cartoon Contest organized by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer which took place in Garland, Texas. Muslim fundamentalists have issues with artistic representations of the Religion of Peace’s warlord prophet, so two armed jihadists tried to disrupt that event and slaughter the participants but were killed in the attempt. Especially since then, social media attacks and death threats have become a way of life for Fawstin, whose artwork has graced many David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlets and FrontPage Mag articles (including this one).

I asked my friend and colleague Bosch recently about being targeted for his defense of free speech and about his perspective on the social justice agenda dominating the comics world.

Mark Tapson: Earlier this year Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders announced that he was organizing a “Draw Muhammad” contest similar to the Texas event which you won, to be held in his party’s offices in the Netherlands, and that you would be the judge. Quite an honor. It’s already drawing condemnation, if you’ll pardon the pun; an op-ed in The Economist, for example, argues that it should not be allowed to go forward and that legislation should be drafted against “speech which is grossly offensive, menacing or false.” How do you respond to that?

Bosch Fawstin: I think The Economist’s estimation is grossly offensive, menacing and false. Muslims have MURDERED cartoonists over cartoons. The time for anyone to be offended by cartoons – and not by those who murder over cartoons – is over, at least in reality. In the unreality that leftists and Muslims demand that we observe, cartoons cause terrorism, with some Muslims even calling cartoons themselves terrorism. This is mad, and it has to be pushed back against and mocked, and that’s partly why I continue to draw Mohammad cartoons.

MT: The Southern Poverty Law Center, the news media’s go-to source for so-called “hate groups” even though the SPLC itself is a leftist-funded smear organization, included you in an “anti-Muslim roundup” in May. The left insists on using this demonizing label “anti-Muslim” rather than anti-Islam. Can you talk about the distinction?

BF: “Anti-Muslim” is a smear which requires our own cultural values to be used against us, as our culture values people, individual human beings, unlike Islamic culture, and so to call Islam critics “anti-Muslim” is to defame them as anti-people, not as critics who are fighting evil ideas. And it works, to an extent, as the weaker among us don’t want to be associated with those who are [considered to be] against people. As for the SPLC, the first thing they did right after I survived a jihadist attack was to list me as a one-man “hate group,” and they did an interview right after the attack in which they said that they were trying to find my location, and that they had whittled it down to one area. Think about that: an American citizen almost dies in an attack by the Islamic enemy, and this American arch-hate group, SPLC, acted as if they were working with the Islamic enemy, trying to find my location (to what end?) and defaming me, while saying nothing about those who had just tried to kill me and everyone else at the Garland event.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/who_coordinating_the_sudden_looney_leftist_lionization_of_stormy_daniels.html

Stormy Daniels is big and getting bigger. The left-wing press all of a sudden just can’t get enough of her.

They’re slathering the two-bit porn “star” with heroicism these days, with several more major media outfits positively lionizing her in what looks like a bizarrely coordinated campaign.

On the surface, it goes to show just how desperate they are to Get Trump. But the timing suggests something more organized.

It started a few days ago, when the New York Times ran an op-ed calling Daniels a “new feminist hero.” According to the Times:

She is a vastly imperfect person by any standard, at times brave and at times venal, obviously admirable and obviously self-interested. These complications, of course, exist in most human beings. But most human beings could not survive the scrutiny she is under, nor so deftly dodge efforts at simplistic caricature. What’s incredible is to see Ms. Daniels embody so many human extremes – so much boldness, so many flaws, and so many taboos broken – and to see her story nonetheless believed and acted upon.

Now it’s spread to CNN, which is lionizing the raddled old pornie in its broadcasts with a straight face.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/29/why-conservatives-dont-trust-media-cnn/

On July 27, CNN reported that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, would be willing to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the president knew in advance of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his campaign and a Kremlin-linked lawyer who was allegedly selling dirt on Hillary Clinton. This revelation not only contradicted Trump’s denials, but also Cohen’s testimony to Congress. It was quite the exclusive—the closest we’ve come to ferreting out “collusion” since the last time CNN botched a big scoop.

The story, bylined by Carl Bernstein, Marshall Cohen, and former Obama administration political appointee Jim Sciutto, cited numerous “sources” with knowledge of the supposed bombshell. The Washington Post, chasing the same story, soon outed Cohen’s lawyer, the preternaturally mendacious Lanny Davis, as the source of the contention.

But Davis was forced to walk back the claim, first conceding that he “should have been more clear” and that he “could not independently confirm what happened,” and then he sort of apologized. (It’s worth noting that anyone who trusts Davis as a primary source for any story is likely to be either consciously allowing themselves to be duped or irreparably incompetent.)

Well, on Monday BuzzFeed ran another article in which Davis admitted to being CNN’s source as well, even though the network had initially claimed that Davis had declined to comment for the article—which turns out not only to be untrue but a ham-fisted way to hide the story’s origin.

“We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it,” the network responded. Brian Stelter, CNN’s sometimes censorious media reporter, argued that “pro-Trump web sites are claiming that the CNN story was a ‘lie,’ and that it’s been ‘debunked.’ They might want it to be ‘debunked,’ but it’s not. The critics don’t know who CNN’s sources were.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/29/how-social-media-

Whether it is Twitter’s “shadowban,” Facebook’s news-sifting algorithm, or YouTube’s concern for user “safety,” social media gatekeeping is now deployed shamelessly in the service of leftist politics. The latest victim is Alex Jones. While he is bombastic, prone to conspiracy theories, and, um, loud, that’s not why they banned him. He supports President Trump and is a critic of elite conventional wisdom. That’s his crime.

The Establishment Is Trying to Prevent a Repeat of 2016
In the early days of the World Wide Web—almost 20 years ago now—the watchword was freedom, whether freedom from censorship, freedom from local governments’ sales taxes, or freedom from government surveillance. The emerging tech companies then expressed reasonable concern that restrictions from these quarters would cripple the industry, defeating the emerging benefits of the instantaneous, nearly anonymous, and highly connected network that is the internet.

Then the election of 2016 happened. It was a wake up call to the tech world’s emerging establishment. It particularly traumatized those who thought Obama’s election was a permanent elevation of his politics, his style, as well as the “emerging majority” that brought him to power.

As they previously have done in talk radio, on social media the far right has shown acumen and effectiveness. While this may seem merely like preaching to the converted, it also encourages supporters and the uncommitted by undermining the dominant Left’s pretentions of inevitability and unanimity. Twitter in particular was a great equalizer. Whether president or peon, the accounts looked the same. It soon was overrun by a highly motivated army of right-leaning critics and trolls, hilarious anonymous memes, Pepe the Frog, Trump’s Taco Bowl, and, ultimately, their collective efforts contributed to his electoral victory.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271172/instagram-makes-free-speech-disappear-lloyd-billingsley

Project War Path, a clothing company owned by Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces combat veterans, Charlie Nash of Breitbart News reported Monday, “has been permanently suspended from Facebook’s Instagram platform for ‘hate speech’ after criticizing NFL players who kneel during the national anthem.”

The post in question read, “This sums it up, Veteran’s defend our freedom and keep us safe. Meanwhile overpaid turds throw a leather ball around in an overpriced stadium and shit on all the men and women who have been killed defending our country.”

Project War Path co-owner Tej Gill, a Navy SEAL veteran, told Breibart “players kneeling really hits home with me and my teammates, I think it’s disgusting, an insult to all veterans, Americans, and especially families of veterans that have been killed and wounded during war.”

The same post on Twitter was not removed but Instagram took it down. As Gill explained to Breitbart, “I tried to reinstate my account, the form I filled out said my account was permanently suspended for hate speech. I have not heard anything back from Instagram since.”

Gill cited “a very aggressive censorship operation that is being conducted by Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the mainstream media.” Instagram, as it happens is owned by Facebook, which purchased the upstart in 2012 and turned it into a profit center.