RUTHFULLY YOURS

NBC executive Andrew Lack, reputedly the man who hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News, has cost shareholders of NBC-Universal millions of dollars. The three-year contract paying her a reported $23 million a year is the least of the costs the network must absorb. Had Kelly brought-in the eyeballs of early morning viewers for the Today Show, where she landed after dismal ratings for her Sunday prime-time “news magazine” entry, the money could be considered a wise investment of corporate resources.

But it turns out that, according to this report in the UK Daily Mail, Kelly is driving away viewers from her morning gig. Her:

…program that averages 2.4 million viewers an episode, which is 18 percent below what the hour was pulling in last season according to data from Nielsen.

Things get worse when it comes to the key demographic of adults aged 25 to 54, where the show is down 28 percent from last season.

That “key demo” is what advertisers seek, because brand preferences are not as firmly established as among older viewers, and this age cohort buys a lot of stuff, as they raise kids, buy houses and furnishings, and work hard to pay for all of what advertisers are selling.

And the damage extends to the program that follows:

Those numbers are now having a negative impact on the fourth hour of Today, which is also dropping in total viewers.

The hosts of last season’s pre-Kelly show, Al Roker and Tamron Hall, together reportedly were paid less than half of what Kelly is being paid. Evidently, they were more congenial guests in viewers’ homes. Ratings for daily morning television shows like Today are believed to be driven by viewers’ comfort with and attachment to the personalities of the hosts, who guide them through an overview of what’s happening in the world, along with fluff-like celebrity interviews, cooking, and quasi-stunt segments that revolve around the hosts being put in amusing or interesting situations and settings. The Q Score, which purports to measure the appeal of a celebrity or brand, and the comfort of consumers with it, is vital to success in building a weekday morning viewing habit.

Editor-in-Chief of Frontpage Magazine, Jamie Glazov, was recently threatened with violence by a Muslim on Facebook, and the only one who paid a price for that threat was Jamie, after he posted about it. Facebook ended up suspending him for a week. That’s the basis of my accompanying cartoon. This unfair, unwarranted punishment of those on the Right is happening more and more these days by a platform that pretends to be neutral, but is dominated by hardcore leftist Islamophiles.

I’ve had my own trouble with Facebook. Right after the Garland attack, where Jihadists planned to murder over two hundred of us at the Mohammad Art Exhibit event, Facebook removed me from their platform. It was only after a healthy online protest against my removal that I was reinstated. I’ve enjoyed social media, it’s helped me connect with like-minded individuals around the world, and it’s helped me get my work out there in a way I haven’t before. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that, despite their protestations, they have a secret policy of limiting the reach of those who criticize the Left and Islam.

If Facebook and Twitter were transparent from the outset that they would censor non-leftists and Islam critics, they wouldn’t be as big as they are. But now that they’re massive, the purge is here. But instead of outright removing accounts they find troublesome from their leftist perspective, they secretly limit their reach. Facebook has crippled the accounts of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, limiting their reach to a fraction of what it used to be. Facebook and Twitter are private companies who can do what they want, and who can alienate whoever they want, but they’re underhanded about it and they belie their terms of service, which is supposedly against discrimination. That’s a big reason why their reputations are eroding.

Every mass delusion has a beginning.

One day in the Middle Ages, a French nun began meowing. Other nuns soon joined in. Soon, all the nuns in the convent were meowing together several hours a day. They stopped after neighbors complained, and some soldiers threatened to beat up the nuns.

Like the chorus of meowing nuns, the Russia Truther movement began at a particular time and place: a press conference that Donald Trump conducted on July 27, 2016, in Doral, Florida.

Some background:

In March 2015, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that, while in office, she diverted some 66,000 emails to a server in the basement of her house. As the Associated Press would determine, the server was “vulnerable to hackers” and the setup was “the subject of U.S. government and industry warnings at the time over attacks from even low-skilled intruders.”

After the diversion was discovered, Clinton returned roughly half of the stolen emails. The other half, she claimed, related to private matters and were deleted. Some, it turned out, were destroyed while under subpoena.

Despite the deletions, there was a chance that the stolen emails might be found because Russia and other adversaries probably had their own copies.

In 2015, Mike Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (who would be a Trump adviser), said the odds were “very high—likely,” that Russia and other countries had broken into the system. Mike Morrell, former acting director and deputy director of the CIA, said, “I think that foreign intelligence services, the good ones, have everything on any unclassified network that the government uses.”

The press corps gave a collective cheer this week when federal Judge Kimba Wood forced the public disclosure that Sean Hannity is a client of Michael Cohen, or at least considered to be a client by Mr. Cohen’s attorneys. When they’re done celebrating, perhaps a few media folk will reflect on how they would feel about such treatment for anyone not named Hannity.

Among journalists, the Fox News television host and radio broadcaster is about as popular as the President. And journalists have raised reasonable questions about what obligations Mr. Hannity has to inform his viewers when discussing documents seized by the government that may possibly include information about him. But journalists as well as non-journalists may also reasonably ask why a criminal investigation of an attorney requires publicizing the names of others, regardless of whether they have any connection to the allegations at hand.

Mr. Cohen has primarily served as an attorney for Donald Trump and is now being investigated by the FBI and federal prosecutors. As for Mr. Hannity, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy at National Review writes, “Forget about evidence of wrongdoing. There is not even a suggestion that Hannity is involved in any crimes.” There’s no indication he knows anything about the issues being investigated and furthermore, says Mr. McCarthy, “grand-jury proceedings are secret by law . . . In short, the public does not have the right to know the names of people—whether or not suspected of wrongdoing—who pop up in a criminal investigation.”

The New York Times just won a Pulitzer Prize for “public service.” I’ve never met this “public” to whom the New York Times has provided some great service.

Perhaps that is unfair. After all, the last article I read in the Gray Lady was actually enlightening.

I had just finished my cultural enrichment with “The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant,” a masterpiece by Anna Flagg, and was set to edify the unenlightened wretches I call friends with the knowledge that “immigration does not increase crime,” when I was informed that a colleague’s home had been raided by the FBI!

My colleague (who will remain unnamed) rolled awake to a team of plainclothes agents pointing guns at him. They politely asked for a word. The agents revealed that my colleague’s father-in-law had unknowingly hired a mechanic who makes most of his “hard-earned” cash as a narcotraficante—not exactly the contribution to GPD we were promised from mass immigration.

Why would I assume that a notorious narco is likely either to be an immigrant or second generation? Call it informed prejudice.

Living in one of the last “conservative” bastions of California, that also happens to be more afflicted with criminal immigrants than most areas, I wondered which routine of intellectual gymnastics Flagg, or anyone else in the New York Times’ salon, might perform to rationalize the existence of this particular criminal immigrant. Also unexplainable, the recent kidnapping attempt at an outlet mall near the border; the Border Patrol’s discovery of 231 pounds of methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine stuffed by a mother into her van full of children; the more than 158 gangs not infrequently comprised of, however mythological, criminal immigrants; the men beaten and carjacked in broad daylight at a San Diego college, held hostage by the perpetrators as they drove toward the border, and then ejected from the vehicle so that the stolen car could be driven into Mexico.

Every time you think the left could not possibly sink any lower, you get proof they can. Here is a Canadian woman “journalist”, concerned that the contributions to families of the victims of the horrible bus crash of a junior hockey league team in Saskatchewan, are substantial only because they are going to families of white males, those who are privileged. This is where identity politics takes you, and the left is completely wedded to it (via Matt Vespa, Townhall):

MSNBC is part of NBC, so when MSNBC host Chris Hayes lets loose with his full blown anti-Israel hatred, spouting off Hamas propaganda as fact, this is a major network buying into this garbage, not a fringe cable channel. Tamar Sternahll in The Algemeiner:

In a completely biased report saying Israel is endeavoring to “pick off” unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes discarded any semblance of journalistic professionalism and embraced Hamas propaganda.

The MSNBC host insisted that the figure he provided for the number of Palestinians wounded by Israeli live fire during the Gaza border “March of Return” on March 30 was sound — despite the fact that it was unconfirmed data supplied by a terror group that has a long history of manipulating casualty statistics to suit its propaganda purposes. (snip)

In addition, the accompanying text stated — as fact — that 750 Palestinians were shot.

How is Hayes so certain “that is the correct number” and “that’s the fact” given that the information is supplied by Gaza’s Health Ministry — meaning Hamas itself?

At no point does Hayes attribute the unconfirmed information to Hamas, and nowhere does he point out that the United States, the European Union, Canada, and Israel have all labeled Hamas a terror organization, making it an unreliable source at best.

Indeed, no source has independently verified Hamas’ figure.

” The free press is a threat to freedom of the press, read about it in the mainstream media.”

The media took a brief break from its campaign against the Sinclair Media Group to go after the National Enquirer. The two don’t have anything in common except the perception of being pro-Trump.

In the good old days, going after rival media outlets meant writing nasty things about them. But these days the media doesn’t write nasty things for the sake of writing them. It writes nasty things to get someone fired, investigated or imprisoned. And that’s what its Sinclair and Enquirer stories are about.

CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times had wasted barrels of ink and pixels, to warn that Trump’s criticism of their media outlets represented a grave threat to the First Amendment.

And what better way to protect the First Amendment than by destroying it?

In its story about the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer, the Times managed to suggest that the Enquirer’s support for the President of the United States might strip it of its First Amendment protection.

The Times tells its readers that the “federal inquiry” poses “thorny questions about A.M.I.’s First Amendment protections, and whether its record in supporting Mr. Trump somehow opens the door to scrutiny usually reserved for political organizations.”

That’s a thorny question alright. And there’s plenty more thorns where that one came from.

In ’08, the New York Times published an op-ed by Obama, but rejected McCain’s response. It just published an editorial titled, “Watch Out, Ted Cruz. Beto is Coming” which appears to have no purpose other than to help Beto O’Rourke raise money from New York Times readers.

The Times has a sharp thorn. So sharp it could punch a hole in it and the entire mainstream media.

A Republican senator challenged Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hate speech policies during his congressional testimony Tuesday, asking the Facebook boss if he could define it.

Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) said he worried about policies that are “less than First Amendment full-spirit embracing in my view.”

“I worry about a world where when you go from violent groups to hate speech in a hurry,” Sasse told Zuckerberg. “Facebook may decide it needs to police a whole bunch of speech that I think America may be better off not having policed by one company that has a really big and powerful platform.”

“Can you define hate speech?” he asked.

Zuckerberg said it would be hard to pin down a specific definition, and mentioned speech “calling for violence” as something Facebook does not tolerate.

“I’m worried about the psychological categories around speech,” Sasse interjected. “We see this happening on college campuses all across the country. It’s dangerous.”

Zuckerberg said he did not think pro-life speech would fit any of Facebook’s definitions for hate speech, adding that he “generally agrees” with Sasse’s point.