RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/11/nbc-alters-headline-after-criticism-classic-msm-gaslighting/

On Monday, an elderly Jewish man, 65-year-old Paul Kessler, succumbed to injuries sustained at a pro-Palestinian protest over the weekend after he was hit in the head by a pro-Palestinian protester.

Despite the extensive media reports about the deadly incident, NBC News’ headline is classic Mainstream Media gaslighting.  The original headline read, “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.”

Keller did not just “hit his head.” He was attacked by a pro-Palestine protestor and assaulted with a megaphone.

The vicious blow caused Keller to fall to the ground where suffered an additional blow to the head, compounding his injuries.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that Kessler, “was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)” during which he “fell backwards and struck his head on the ground.”

The statement added that the “Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office determined the cause of death to be blunt force head injury and the manner of death homicide.”

Mr. Keller died from homicide, not from “hitting his head” in a passive fall.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/the_media_and_the_gaza_hospital_hoax.html

Conservative media had a field day exposing the MSM on its collective false claim that Israel bombed the Gaza hospital and that 500 died.  It was covered well on AT.  Drew Holden and Thaleigha Rampersad at the Washington Free Beacon supplied the complete list of media outlets that were duped or unquestioningly went along.  Truth won.  Or did it?

When a story like the Gaza hospital bombing comes out, it is the lead on all the networks, the main headline in the large bold font atop the print and internet editions of news sites.  By the time the media get around to their stealth edits, inaccurate corrections on page A24, and 15-second network news retractions, the damage is done and never undone.  The internet does help get the word out, but the half of the populace still relying on TV news, too liberal to visit conservative sites, or too filled with hatred for Israel, will still think that Israel bombed the hospital or at least tries to do such things.

You think I’m kidding?  Recall the al-Dura affair in 2000, in which video captured a Palestinian boy supposedly caught in an Israeli-Palestinian crossfire and allegedly killed by the Israelis, with the picture of him crying while crouching next to his father at a wall behind a barrel still etched in the world’s mind.  But the evidence is overwhelming that the scene was faked, that the boy likely didn’t even die, and that the spliced-and-diced video of Al-Dura shown on France 2 was a travesty.  It led to French court scenes reminiscent of the Dreyfus affair.  In the end truth won, right?  Wrong.  The initial press coverage led directly to the so-called Second Intifada in which 1,000 Israelis and around double that number of Palestinians died.  And to this day much of the world still holds Israel responsible.

Closer to home, the press breathlessly reported over a long period of time on alleged Trump-Russia collusion.  A lot of intrepid investigative work mainly by conservative media finally uncovered that this was a plot concocted by Hillary Clinton and her operatives, who used the Perkins Coie law firm (which at some point set aside office space for FBI participation) as a cutout to hire Christopher Steele of Fusion GPS as a cutout to concoct his infamous dossier implicating Trump.  So truth won, right?  Wrong.  To this day, a large chunk of Americans (if I recall, a recent poll suggested it’s close to 40%) still thinks Trump was a Russian spy, which is bad enough, but not only that, these charges and the Mueller investigation hampered Trump’s first term.  Think of the possibly permanent damage done to our country these last three years due to Trump’s ouster.  They won and truth lost.  Mission accomplished, and no one was even punished.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/23/americans-trust-in-the-media-hits-all-time-low-in-latest-ii-tipp-poll/

Do the major media outlets in the U.S., online, on-air or in print, care whether their audience trusts them or not? It certainly doesn’t seem to be the case today. Americans’ trust in the U.S. media has plunged to its lowest levels ever, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll data show.

Both big, mainstream “traditional” media outlets and mid-sized “alternative” media outlets continue to suffer from declining revenues as their audience and readership numbers shrink. The October I&I/TIPP Poll shows that a loss in underlying trust is a key cause of media industry decline.

The poll was taken Sept. 27-29 from among 1,378 adults around the country and has a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.

Each month, I&I/TIPP asks two questions:

First, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

Second, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, RealClearPolitics, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

There is no good news to report to the media. Both the traditional media group and the alternative media group hit new all-time lows this month, as readers, viewers and listeners became increasingly disgruntled by what they consider to be biased and inaccurate reporting.

For the major media, 63% of those responding said they either had “little trust” (29%) or “no trust at all” (34%). Just 30% said they had either “a lot of trust” (8%) or “quite a bit of trust” (22%). Just 6% said they were “not sure.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/the-rebirth-of-both-sides/

The free press in the West, which has spent the past seven years warning of the dangers of “both sides” news coverage, insists now that there are two sides to the story of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,300 people, most of whom were unarmed Israeli civilians.

On October 7, Israel suffered its worst terrorist attack in the post–World War II era, as Hamas militants attacked Israeli communities by air, land, and sea. As of this writing, the estimated death toll of 1,300, which includes infants, women, and the elderly, also includes 27 U.S. citizens. In addition, Hamas has taken an estimated 150 hostages.

It’s rare that a news event is as black-and-white as this, with no gray areas, involving clearly laid out villains and victims. Terrorists murdered civilians. That’s the news story. The way the murders were carried out, and the sheer death toll, are shocking. In terms of straightforward reporting, there is plenty to go around for journalists. Who survived the attacks and how? What did the survivors see and hear? Most important: What happened? Yet, instead of focusing exclusively on uncovering the “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “why” of the horrors of October 7, the free media insist upon presenting their work through a “root causes” prism, balancing their coverage of the terrorist attack equally with coverage of Palestinians’ criticisms of Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/thomas-friedman-equates-trump-and-netanyahu-with-putin-and-xi/

New York Times foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an opinion piece published by the New York Times on October 4th, entitled “How Four Leaders Are Turning the World Upside Down.” The four leaders whom Mr. Friedman lumped together in a disgusting display of moral equivalence were Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, former U.S. President Donald Trump, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He accused them all of having “created massive disruptions inside and outside their countries based on pure self-interest, rather than the interests of their people.”

Thomas Friedman’s condemnations of Putin and Xi were spot on, but he went off the rails completely by including Netanyahu and Trump on his list and claiming that Donald Trump “is the most dangerous of the four.” Friedman left out altogether North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un who has ramped up North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile testing and launches. And he skipped over Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose regime is arming Russia in Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine and is providing military and financial support to Islamist terrorists.

Mr. Friedman has written several columns that have taken Prime Minister Netanyahu to task, mostly because of what he absurdly has labeled “a judicial coup led by Netanyahu.” The so-called “judicial coup” was legislation approved by Israel’s duly elected Knesset to rein in the runaway power of unelected Israeli Supreme Court judges. The judges have taken it upon themselves to invalidate laws passed by the Knesset because the judges believed the laws were not “reasonable.”

Israel’s judiciary arrogated to itself the power to override legislation and government executive actions based on the judges’ subjective judgments that not all the related aspects of the policy issues involved were adequately considered and accorded their proper weight. The judges went far beyond deciding whether the Knesset or government officials exceeded their authority as defined in Israel’s Basic Laws or arbitrarily committed an outrageous act that was grossly unjust. And they went far beyond deciding whether the Knesset or government officials unduly infringed on a person’s fundamental human rights to dignity and liberty as spelled out in the Basic Laws. Instead of serving as an independent check to ensure that these limits on legislative and executive powers were not exceeded, the Israeli Supreme Court judges have turned themselves into an unelected super-legislative branch.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-derangement-syndrome-infects-the-journal/

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an unsigned op-ed unworthy of one of the best teams of commentators in the country. The subject was some comments Donald Trump made on Truth Social that, by surprise, displayed his trademark turbo-charged hyperbole. The Journal is usually a reliable source of sober, judicious, and fact-based analysis, but this editorial is a troubling portent that Republican Trump-Derangement Syndrome hysteria may have a negative impact on next year’s election.

Trump’s heinous sin, according to the editors, is saying “that Gen. Mark Milley, the nation’s highest military officer, deserves execution—as in death. He said NBC should be investigated for treason and that the FBI should raid the homes of Senate Democrats. Then he accused President Biden of being manipulated by ‘the Fascists in the White House.’”

Now listen to what Trump actually said about Milley as quoted by the Journal: “‘This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!  [emphasis added].’” That’s more nuanced than saying Milley “deserves execution.” 

Read carefully, one wonders why the editorial would provide its own refutation. Take “Woke train wreck.” Has the Journal forgotten that in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Milley argued for bringing critical race theory propaganda into the military academies and the armed forces’ training programs?

Is that not “woke”? And given the recruiting crisis across the services, caused in part by subjecting troops to a truly racist and preposterous leftist ideology, is there any wonder that potential recruits who would join up to be trained as warriors and fight for their country, would pass on being told that their country is “systematically racist,” including them?

https://victorhanson.com/american-pravda-part-one/

In communist countries, there were two levels of consciousness, two mindsets in other words. What all people mouthed publicly became the opposite of what most thought in private. When the private mind finally became all dominant, the entire system of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe abruptly collapsed under the weight of its own lies.

The theme of George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 was that an abjectly cynical society that assumed what the government broadcasted and what was supposed to be orthodox were complete lies.

The truth was to be found only in whispered private conversations. Such mass schizophrenia resulted from the state’s desire and ability to hurt anyone who dared to tell the truth. But when the lies finally became too outrageous to pass off as true, and half the population no longer bothered to lie in public, the system either collapsed or turned murderous.

America is still ostensibly a free society. Or is it really—when the state, the media, and the elite establish rules of acceptable public discourse and expression, and they brand any opponents to their party lines as apostates to be canceled, doxed, shadow banned, and ostracized?

So, the problem is not just a weaponized FBI that pays off social media to ban unwelcome news, or government boards that brand as “hate” speech or “disinformation” what they find inconvenient. Nor are we dealing just with a corrupt Department of Justice that targets perceived opponents and exempts its supporters.

For example, does anyone believe that Donald Trump would face 91 indictments had he on January 7, 2021, just announced that he had no intention to run again for president? Would Elon Musk be facing possible federal suits had he promised to keep “speech moderators” on Twitter and announced that he was a diehard Biden supporter? Would Hunter Biden have been able to shake down foreign oligarchs and governments with impunity all these years were his father not a leftwing vice president and then a likely candidate for president and now commander in chief?

Still, the real culprit for our empire of lies is the culture of our bicoastal elite that uses its influence, wealth, political clout, social media, and the administrative state to create virtual realities that have nothing to do with the real world, but instead reflect the ridiculous utopian agendas of those who have enough money and clout to avoid the baleful concrete consequences of their ideologies.