RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/the_new_york_times_then_the_new_york_times_now.html

The current indictment of James A. Wolfe, 58, Security Director for the Senate Subcommittee on Intelligence for 29 years, for passing classified information to reporters raises an interesting contrast of editorial standards under different editors at theTimes over the years.

In his interrogation, Wolfe admitted having a personal relationship with reporter Ali Watkins for three years while she was 30 years his junior. Watkins had zoomed from college through other news organizations in just four years to becoming National Security Correspondent for The New York Times, attended by her extraordinary access to insider information in the Federal government. In its investigation, the Department of Justice examined “tens of thousands” of email correspondence and phone records between Wolfe and Watkins, according to the Wolfe indictment.

“She [Ali Watkins] is having her private records scrutinized and spied on by the government for doing her job as a journalist, and the Justice Department’s move should be loudly condemned by everyone no matter your political preference,” The Freedom of the Press Foundation said.

According to a New York Times spokeswoman: “Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy, and communications between journalists and their sources demand protection. ” She added: “Ms. Watkins said she told editors at BuzzFeed News and Politico about it and continued to cover national security, including the committee’s work.” And the New York Times had also been informed about Ms Watkin’s three-year-long personal relationship with Wolfe.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2018/06/10/indoctrination/?print=1

In its ongoing mission to “epater le bourgeois,” the NYT Style section features an essay by a woman who decides to give sado-masochism a try. (Wanting to Be Dominated, But Not Quite Like That, Aly Tadros 6/10) She tells us about her previous travails – boiler-plate issues with an immigrant father who didn’t understand her, his illness and death, her drinking and her rejection by a previous boyfriend – none of these either extraordinary or interesting. The woman claims not to be a masochist yet she is willing to be bitten hard, whipped with a belt and treated as just one of this man’s submissive playthings outside of his relationship with the woman he lives with and presumably loves. Part of it is explained by her having the freedom to scream, cry and release all the emotions she previously hid or submerged in alcohol, but part is also the titillation of Fifty Shades of Gray and the ongoing acceptance of deviancy as a suitable subject for mainstream media. The subtext is that it’s restorative to behave like a child whose tantrums will be tolerated rather than a grown woman who is expected to control emotional outbursts and deal with common life situations.

It’s not important to know whether this story is real or fabricated because on its own, it doesn’t merit a second thought. It’s only worth noting as part of the Times’ determination to force recognition and acceptance of all sorts of what used to be called “perverse behavior.” How much of its newsprint is devoted to transgender issues – in education, the military, the arts – how much respectful attention it gave to porn star Stormy Daniels, the front page review a year ago by critic Alistair Macaulay of dance that included anal penetration as part of its choreography. All this from the old grey lady that used to be called the newspaper of record.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/watch-4-corners-part-ii/
Four Corners is an Australian investigative journalism/current affairs documentary television program now airing the Trump Russian collusion narrative…..rsk

The first episode of 4 Corners’ globe-girdling ‘investigation’ of the purported Russia/Trump conspiracy didn’t cover any fresh ground. What it did was omit a wealth of essential background information, allowing host Sarah Ferguson to gabble breathlessly about the ‘story of the century’ that isn’t.

Hello and welcome to Four Corners. Tonight we begin our special, three-part investigation into the story of the century: the election of US president Donald Trump and his ties to Russia.

Since his inauguration, President Trump has been caught up in a rolling series of allegations. More than a year ago special prosecutor Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and whether Trump and his campaign officials helped them. Also under investigation are Trump’s business links with Russia, testing allegations that his deal-making has exposed him to compromise (sic).

Over the next few weeks you’ll meet the characters in this extraordinary saga.

We begin by following the spies and the money trail.
– Sarah Ferguson’s preamble to Monday’s 4 Corners

_______________________

4 cornersThus did ABC personality Sarah Ferguson kick off the national broadcaster’s detailing of Trump’s alleged fealty to Russia. Now information is the foundation of any journalistic exercise: gather facts, place them in context, lay them before the public so that, once provided with the full picture, the citizenry can form its own well-versed opinions. More than a professional obligation, it is a sacred trust. Or should be.

The key, though, is that all relevant information be presented and, more important than that, any such exercise not be freighted with loaded words and presumptions presented as undisputed fact. In this regard Ms Ferguson’s introduction violated a number of key tenets before the “investigation” proper was shared with viewers whose taxes paid for it.

For example, she tells her audience they are about to see “the story of the century”. Just twenty-three words later, the “story” — a word which suggests facts, plot and resolution — is no better than a “series of allegations.” Our century is relatively young to be sure, but are “allegations” yet to be established by Special Counsel Robert Mueller a bigger yarn than, say, the 9/11 massacres, the Syrian civil war, the failure of the Arab Spring, 2008’s global financial crisis, Benghazi, the election of the first black president? One could go on, but you get the point. In newsroom parlance, 4 Corners has hauled out the MixMaster and produced a standard issue ABC-style beatup.

Let’s pull apart this breathless exercise in error, omission and sensationalism one scene at a time.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/08/bullies-in-the-white-house-press

Of all the post-2016 credibility casualties—the Clintons, the FBI, Hollywood, professional athletes, late-night comedians—the American news media is the most bloodied.

After fluffing Barack Obama for a decade—so much so that the former president still claims with a straight face that his presidency was scandal-free—the press is going after the Trump White House with a level of malice and animus that borders on abuse.

In its servile, vainglorious attempt to score points with each other and feed an insatiable Trump-hating constituency, the media has participated in a shameful degradation of an institution that was once viewed as a critical American liberty. Newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and cable news outlets CNN and MSNBC, have done most of the heavy lifting—particularly in fueling one side of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which includes reporting illegally leaked classified information to damage anyone in Trump’s orbit.

Not only has their collective political coverage been deemed overwhelmingly negative by objective observers (a study by Harvard University last year concluded, “Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity”), the professional conduct of individual reporters and cable news hosts has been—to borrow a term they embrace for others—deplorable. Any pretense of objectivity is gone; professionalism and common courtesy is nowhere to be found. One only has to watch a White House press briefing for evidence.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/08/the-creepy-and-creeping

With the recent revelations that “

Google allowed “Nazism” to be associated with the California Republican Party in searches, to YouTube removing purely mechanical gun content, to the news that Facebook allowed far greater access to private data than anyone realized, it’s time to have a conversation about what these social and tech giants really are.

We should acknowledge social media has had a positive effect over the years in breaking the monopoly on information flow. The traditional gatekeepers can no longer stop conversations they don’t approve because social media platforms have been an extraordinary means for people and groups to connect and communicate locally, regionally, and internationally. They’ve allowed upstarts, outsiders, and disrupters like Donald Trump, or movements like Brexit, to break through and actually win.

For almost 20 years, the federal communications and competitive regulatory environment that was in place allowed companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google (and their many competitors that either no longer exist or that have been subsumed into the victorious behemoths) to operate more freely and with fewer regulatory impediments compared to other traditional communications companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. For example, Facebook, Google and Amazon had far looser federal policies to adhere to related to the kind of personal data they could collect about their customers, how long they could store that data, and what they could sell or share with other entities. The “traditional” communications companies had to adhere to much more stringent rules.

That was then. Now we need a conversation about social media and tech giants in light of what they’ve become. They’re all grown up now and it’s time for the kids in Silicon Valley to start operating under the rules that govern the other adults. And by that, I mean media and telecommunications companies.

If entities are creating content, selling advertising, streaming both live and produced original content, publishing original content, deploying broadband and wireless internet, even offering voice and video communications services, haven’t they become publishers and telecommunications companies? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing and exactly what they are.

https://pjmedia.com/video/apple-exec-our-top-news-stories-are-hand-picked-by-our-editorial-team/

An Apple executive today said that the top news stories for Apple News are “handpicked” by an editorial team, arousing suspicion that left-wing bias is at play in the stories we see on its news app.

Apple News editor-in-chief Lauren Kern told an audience at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), that Apple’s popular news app serves users the “stories you want to read pulled together from trusted sources.”

“Our top stories are handpicked by the Apple editorial team to make a great collection of curated content,” she said.

Facebook ran into trouble with conservatives two years ago when former editors blew the whistle on the practice of using “news curators” to handpick news content and weed out conservative points of view.

Former editors for Facebook’s news aggregation service told Gizmodo that they had “the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to.” While selections for stories are automated, the “news curators” claimed some sources and topics were “blacklisted” to avoid exposing readers to conservative points of view.

In an effort to resolve allegations of bias against conservatives, Facebook changed its process for trending topics.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/what-facebook-and-google-do-with-your-information-should-not-be-a-surprise/

The recent fuss about Facebook and Google’s tracking programs, and the ad targeting they offer has caused me to realize that most people either don’t understand or don’t care how advertising works. As the former CTO of an Internet advertising startup, I’ve given it a lot of thought in the last few years. This being me, the math geek, I’ve done a lot of this thinking mathematically, but I promise that I won’t inflict the math part on you.

Or at least not much.

So, let’s think about what advertising is for. The idea is to entice, and even convince, potential customers to become actual customers, and to buy things.

There are a million ways to do this, from old-fashioned word-of-mouth, to newspaper and magazine ads, to ShamWow pitchmen on late-night TV, to computer games that give you some kind of in-game goodies for watching an ad. (I’ve recently been compulsively playing a “terraform the universe” game that works like this; I hope to write a review soon.)

Every advertising method has some inherent cost. Word-of-mouth is low cost; national TV is expensive; others are in between. Every advertisement also has an inherent potential reward when someone is convinced, but not every person who sees an advertisement will actually buy the product. (I regularly see ads for products I already own; I imagine most everyone else has the same experience.)

This means we’ve wandered into the world of probability. Here’s the first of the two equations I’m going to mention, and I promise there’s nothing more than multiplication and division in either one. This first equation is called the expectation value, and it’s

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/31/the-carnivores-

After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the 1974 elections.

Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the Nixon Administration.

Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA, and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative media, and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama Administration.

Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveilled. Many of those names then were leaked illegally to the press.

Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican candidate Donald Trump—largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.

Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and politically motivated Steele dossier.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/when-is-it-okay-to-drop-the-c-word-bomb-on-a-woman/

When her dad is a POTUS from the wrong party.

It’s been a little over 24 hours since Roseanne Barr blew up her career (again) for saying something really stupid and hateful (again). And now, yet another alleged comedienne is in the news for being a loony, vulgar piece of garbage.

First, some background. On Sunday, Ivanka Trump tweeted the following with a picture of herself and her baby:
Ivanka Trump
✔ @IvankaTrump

My ♥️! #SundayMorning

If you think that’s just a nice photo of a mother with her baby, you’re obviously not #Resisting enough.

Ladies and gentlemen: the comedic stylings of Ms. Samantha Bee.

Samantha Bee’s response:
Jon Levine
✔ @LevineJonathan
Samantha Bee to @IvankaTrump on Full Frontal tonight:

“Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices you feckless cunt!”

As David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon notes:

The remark came at the end of her weekly program “Full Frontal’s” A block, where the left-wing comic blasted the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents at the border. Bee acknowledged this policy did not begin under President Trump, but she said he had made it worse.