RUTHFULLY YOURS

“A New York Times story about alleged Trump team contacts with Russian officials was “in the main not true.” (The New York Post quoting James Comey, 6/8.)

Now over to the opposite end of the media’s political spectrum:

“The assumption of the critics of the president, of his pursuers (especially the New York Times) …is that somewhere along the line in the last year the president had something to do with colluding with the Russians…and yet what came apart this morning was that theory,” (Chris Matthews, MSNBC 6/8.)

In brief, after last week’s Senate hearings it looks like we have (at least a semblance) of a media consensus regarding the famous claims by The New York Times against Trump and his team. The claims involved “collusion” with the Russians—and they appear bogus.

Interestingly, earlier this week in an editorial, The New York Times bewailed the lack of collusion between Trump and Russia’s historic colluders on our doorstep.

“To the long list of Barack Obama’s major initiatives that President Trump is obsessed with reversing, we may soon be able to add Cuba…Mr. Trump promised in his campaign to return to a more hard-line approach. If he does, as seems likely, he will further isolate America, hurt American business interests and, quite possibly, impede the push for greater democracy on the Caribbean island.” (New York Times, 6/5)

It’s a fascinating thing to watch. And it never fails. Let the issue of American “robber-barons” doing business with the Stalinist/kleptocratic Castro family (who already stole $8 billion from U.S. businessmen and tortured and murdered a few who resisted the burglary)—let this issue pop-up and presto!

Like clockwork, the most historically pinko, the most relentlessly anti-business entities in the U.S.– from Bernie Sanders to the New York Times—the very folks who habitually foam-at-the-mouth for keelhauling and tar & feathering all “greedy businessmen!” suddenly morph into Calvin Coolidge.

Recall President Coolidge’s famous (and universally denounced by liberals) quip: “The business of America is business.” Let’s also throw in General Motors’ CEO Charlie Wilson’s famous, “if it’s good for GM it’s good for America-and vice versa.” You might call these the favorite captions when liberal demonize “greedy U.S. robber-barons!”

It’s official – according to the New York Times. The “newspaper of record,” citing a June 14 article by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine, reports that the Fox News Channel (FNC) has retired its motto of “Fair & Balanced,” which it had used prominently since the channel started in 1996. Back then, FNC founder Roger Ailes came up with the slogan to distinguish the channel from its competitors, CNN and MSNBC, and the rest of the mainstream media, which Ailes and millions of Americans considered to be biased in favor of the left.

The slogan “Fair & Balanced” hung on until last August when, according to an unnamed source cited by Sherman, it was quietly ditched because of its association with Ailes. The founder of FNC had become persona non grata after being unceremoniously removed from Fox News the month before as a result of allegations that he had sexually harassed a number of female Fox employees. (Allegations, it should be noted, that were denied by Ailes and his representatives and that were never heard in a court of law.)

The new Fox News motto is “Most Watched, Most Trusted.”

In terms of “most watched,” it is true that ratings for Fox News held strong through May of this year. But in the wake of the 2017 departures of marquee talent including Bill O’Reilly in April, and Fox News co-president Bill Shine, an Ailes loyalist, in May, FNC’s ratings are not the consistent powerhouse they once were.

For example, the latest posted cable news ratings for Tuesday June 13, a day that was slightly unusual because of live coverage of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions Senate hearings that ran until after 5 PM EDT, are mixed news for FNC. In the prime time total viewers category, Fox beat MSNBC by 276,000 viewers – 2.888 million to 2.612 million. Third place CNN was far behind in prime time with only1.124 million. In the so-called demo (viewers 25-54 that advertisers prefer and that determine a channel’s ad rates), MSNBC was first with 620,000 viewers followed by Fox (592,000) and CNN (448,000).

The number one show in all of cable news prime time – this is becoming a trend – was uber liberal Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC at 9 PM EDT with 743,000 viewers in the demo, beating FNC’s The Five by 232,000 viewers. CNN at 9 PM was a distant also-ran. Maddow also had the largest number of total viewers (all ages) with 3.055 million of them. This number beat Maddow’s FNC competition, The Five, which had 2.695 million viewers.

Also worth reporting about in the view of many is the already faltering career of Megyn Kelly, the one-time Fox News superstar who quit Fox for NBC last January with high hopes of maybe being the next Oprah or Barbara Walters. Kelly’s new prime time NBC network show, Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly, premiered on June 4, but its second run on June 11 had half as many total viewers and came in second to CBS News’s five decade old newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

CNN’s news is fake news. CNN’s stories are lies. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is an exposed plagiarizer, but beyond all that, CNN anchors are the worst hypocrites on the air. Legitimate journalists present the news fairly regardless of their personal political views. CNN “journalists” still need safe spaces if someone criticizes Obama yet they endorse every vile lie and vicious action against Trump. CNN anchors are the talking puppets of their corporate owners who are driven by a singular ambition – to overthrow the America-first government of President Donald Trump. The globalists who own CNN want an internationalized America – they do not want a strong, independent, sovereign America led by an America-first President. They want a weak, internationalized socialized America with globalized trade agreements that benefit themselves at the expense of American workers.

The overpaid CNN bobbleheads deliberately create confusion with their unremitting lies and outrageous talking points. They foment anarchy and violence against the President of the United States and should be exposed as the deceitful puppets they are. James Comey had already testified before Congress and made it crystal clear that President Trump never directed him to stop the investigation into the Russians – there was no wrongdoing and no basis for any case against Trump for obstruction of justice. Yet, plagiarist Fareed Zakaria pursued the matter and invited Elizabeth Foley of Florida International University and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School to discuss pursuing President Donald Trump with charges of obstruction of justice.

Tribe tried to argue that there are “bigger” issues at play and talked about “abuse of power.” Tribe’s statement is typical of the left-wing liberal narrative that turns any specific debate into a scripted general diatribe against Donald Trump in an attempt to delegitimize and discredit Trump’s presidency. Our jurisprudence system in the United States was designed to be blind – it deliberately concerned itself with the WHAT of behavior not the WHO. This is an essential distinction because the Democrats under Barack Obama have turned our jurisprudence system upside down and ripped the blindfold off Lady Justice. The Democrats’ obsession with destroying Donald Trump has eradicated any semblance of fairness and transformed the left-wing liberal Democratic Party into an end-justifies-the-means movement of hypocrites determined to ignore the actual crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and focus on imagined crimes to discredit President Donald Trump.

The only Russian connection worth pursuing is Hillary Clinton’s mendacious sale of 20% of our American uranium to Russia disguised as a legitimate sale to Canada. The Canadians, who made staggering donations to the Clinton Foundation, sold their company to the Russians who now own 20% of our uranium and control much of the world’s uranium – a necessary ingredient for nuclear bombs. Hillary Clinton’s secret relationship with Russia continues to threaten our national security. That is the real Russian connection – not some fictitious concocted story about Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton has honed lying to an art form. The bogus “Benghazi video”that never existed was a lie created to protect the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama. Four Americans were killed but that is of little consequence to crooked Hillary.

The cable television news channel ratings for the week of Monday through Friday June 5-9, 2017 are in and the news continues to be bad for the ailing Fox News Channel. According to TVNewser, which is part of adweek.com:

Rachel Maddow [on MSNBC] had the No. 1 show of the night [Friday June 9], and MSNBC won the week in Monday – Friday prime time among adults 25-54. Fox News remains on top of cable news in total viewers.

This is terrible news for the Fox News Channel which gradually started to lose its commanding 15 year long ratings lead after the firing of its most popular prime time host Bill O’Reilly on April 19. The post-O’Reilly schedule change at FNC – which moved the program The Five from 5 to 9 PM ET and Tucker Carlson from 9 to 8 PM – is proving to be a disaster, especially in the 9 o’clock hour as The Five is continuing to lose ground against the competition as time goes on.

On Friday, June 9, for example, Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC at 9 PM, bested The Five in the all-important 25-54 age group demographic by almost two to one: 647,000 to 370,000 viewers. In total viewers for that hour, Maddow and MSNBC also beat Fox News: 2,620,000 to 2,307,000 viewers. In past years, FNC wiped the floor with MSNBC in total viewers in almost every prime time hour because FNC’s viewers are on average a decade older than MSNBC’s, and older viewers, tending to be more conservative, have overwhelmingly gravitated to Fox News in the past.

That seems to be no longer the case. Overall, more people are tuning into cable news these days – presumably motivated by the unceasing attacks on the Trump Administration by MSNBC and CNN. This unmistakable wave of anti-Trump viewers is pumping up the numbers for MSNBC and, to an extent, CNN, both of which have emerged as frontline leaders in the “resist” Trump movement. Most likely, the ratings collapse of Fox News is accountable to both new anti-Trump viewers flocking to MSNBC and CNN while long time Fox News viewers, fed up with FNC’s obvious shift to the left, increasingly abandon the channel, either to seek other options for conservative news or to tune out altogether.

Last weekend’s cable news ratings will be available late Tuesday afternoon, and it will be interesting to see which of the three news channels triumphed on Saturday and Sunday, particularly with the second installment of Steve Hilton’s new weekly Fox News program on Sundays at 9 PM, The Next Revolution.

I believe that the New Media deserve major credit for deconstructing the Old Media narrative. Right after James Comey’s much-hyped congressional testimony, several New Media sites picked up the real news – namely, that Comey had actually outed himself as a top leaker in the Deep Government by sending his own written memo, typed on government time, on a government computer, to attack the president of the United States, with no proof of illegal or unethical behavior at all.

That should have been the lead story for the New Media. We had the Comey leaker story, and we told the story, but it was reactive; it took the false narrative of Trump’s supposed obstruction of justice as the point of departure. That seems to validate the false accusation against Trump and only pointed out its falsehoods.

The Old Media don’t play defense. They play offense, and let the truth be damned. The New Media are winning the battle for American minds, but they have not yet learned to actively drive the news cycle.

As a result, Trump’s magnificent spectacle in Saudi Arabia, which turned the Saudis, along with 50 national Muslim leaders, along with Egypt, Israel and the United States, against Iranian aggression and Iran’s proxy state, Qatar, went more or less unnoticed. Today, the Gulf Council alliance, backed by the United States, is starting to choke Arab commerce with Qatar, and if that campaign succeeds, the Qataris will have to back down.

On top of all that, for the first time since 9/11, we have pinpointed a major source of funding and direction for horrific massacres in the West – namely, Qatar. This is a clear move against the Iranian terror sponsors as well, therefore this is a strategic move against the Shi’ite half of jihad.

The Saudis have to do much, much more. But Trump (aided by Mattis and Jared Kushner) has started a major turning point in the jihad war. The huge MOAB weapon against ISIS in Afghanistan is part of the strategic turnaround.

This would be amusing if the subject matter weren’t so serious.

CNN was caught on video last week literally staging an anti-terror protest by a group of Muslim women.

The crew tightly packs the approximately two dozen protesters together with signs facing the camera, while Anderson monologues about the “beautiful” anti-terror protest.

CNN International responded to the claims that they staged the protest, writing, “This is nonsense. Police let demonstrators through the cordon to show their signs. CNN along with other media simply filmed them doing so.”

Oh, really? Here’s a YouTube video showing what was going on prior to the Twitter video:

Youtube video taken by Claire Jordan shows her milling around the scene and “protest” prior to CNN lining up the protesters for their on-air shot.

There is a group of people in the area, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and some of them can be seen handing out bouquets of flowers and posters.

Jordan, narrating the video, observes, “you see more press than anyone else.

Jordan then crosses the street and shows the Muslim women who were featured on the CNN broadcast. They are located on the opposite side of the street and “they’re taking selfies, none of them have got flowers.”

“I was there just before,” she explains, “and you see, again, this is the group of women and the little boy–they’re just getting their posters now.”

The Muslim women then gather their posters and cross the street to set up for the CNN shot that was used in the broadcast.

“Nonsense,” eh? They “simply filmed” this “authentic” display of anti-terrorism sentiment by a small group of Muslim women? (We had bigger protests against “meatless Fridays” at my high school back in the day.)

Question: Where did the flowers come from? Who made up the signs? Are we to believe that a group of random Muslim women spontaneously showed up and wanted to express their sentiments against terrorism?

I am not saying that these women are expressing a false belief. I have no doubt they — and millions of Muslims around the world — are opposed to terrorism.

But a prominent media outlet staging a protest to play to politically correct notions of what we “should” think about Muslim attitudes toward terrorists and terrorism — and then issuing a lying denial of their part in broadcasting fake news — is absolutely outrageous. Why not just come clean and state the obvious — that protests make good TV and choreographing a demonstration makes sense from a profit-and-loss perspective?

CNN could claim that the sentiment expressed at the demonstration was real and that they just helped get the message out a little bit. But no matter how authentic the feelings, the fact that CNN inserted themselves into the scene to heighten the dramatic effect is inexcusable.

David A. Vise, the author, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Washington Post for 23 years. He has also written several acclaimed non-fiction books, including ‘The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Phillip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History.’

CNN’s publication and retraction of a story about the Trump-Comey conflict illustrates the biggest bias in journalism: the bias in favor of “The Story.”

Similarly, the high-profile reporting by The New York Times on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was at least partially refuted by Comey. He asserted that “in the main” a February story about alleged contacts between Trump lieutenants and Russian government officials was not true. Hours later, the New York Times reported Comey’s comments, but largely stood by their original story.

From my 23 years as a reporter at The Washington Post, I learned from journalism’s giants that bias must be guarded against with vigilance. Legendary Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee grilled reporters when major stories were based, as the CNN and Times stories were, on anonymous sources. Time and time again, Bradlee emphasized the importance of “getting it right,” a need that is heightened when nameless sources are used.

The pressure on reporters and columnists to publish stories that grab headlines and attention often causes them to overreach. This is what Bradlee’s successor as Editor, Len Downie dubbed “the bias in favor of The Story,” something Downie pushed editors to be aware of, and guard against.

This doesn’t mean that anonymous sources should not be used.

Frequently, cultivating sources that don’t want their names revealed is the only way for journalists to report important news and insights. In fact, the biggest journalism story of the last century, The Washington Post’s pursuit of Watergate—which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1973—was based on an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat,” who was cultivated in part by my mentor, Bob Woodward.

Nevertheless, the darkest day in Washington Post history occurred just eight years later in 1981 when the newspaper was forced to give back a Pulitzer Prize it won for stories about a six-year-old heroin addict named Little Jimmy. Two of the best in the business, Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee, oversaw that coverage as editors, but reporter Janet Cooke duped both of them into believing a tale she had made up completely—and which prompted a massive police search for the non-existent boy.

On the day The Post won the Pulitzer, Cooke admitted she had fabricated the story and Bradlee, for his part, commissioned a major independent investigation into The Post newsroom to determine what went wrong and how it could be prevented in the future. Safeguards were adopted, and nothing else like it has since occurred at the newspaper.

Bradlee once told me, “We don’t write the truth. We write what people tell us.” Having said that, he demanded that stories meet a high standard for credibility and guarded the newspaper’s reputation for accuracy zealously.

There are a number of important takeaways from today’s Comey hearings, but one of the big ones elaborated on a point I hit yesterday in discussing Comey’s prepared statement: Trump was never under FBI investigation during the time that Comey headed the FBI, Comey personally told Trump that three times, and Trump grew increasingly frustrated that Comey wouldn’t clear the “cloud” over his head by publicly saying so. Indeed, Trump’s explanation to Lester Holt of why he fired Comey is entirely consistent with this.

But with Comey’s repeated and emphatic testimony that Trump was not under investigation, we have some new revisionist history: wildly backtracking liberals and Democrats claiming that nobody ever said Trump was under FBI investigation. And this is simply untrue. Here’s a sampling of what Democrats, liberals, and the media were saying back when Comey was privately reassuring Trump that he wasn’t under investigation:

Salon, January 20 headline: “The FBI is leading an investigation into Donald Trump’s connections with Russia” — first line, “The FBI is leading a multi-agency investigation into possible links between Russian officials and President-elect Donald Trump.”

Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, March 20: “The FBI is investigating a sitting President. Been a long time since that happened.”

The FBI is investigating a sitting President. Been a long time since that happened.
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) March 20, 2017

The New York Times March 20 headline: “F.B.I. Is Investigating Trump’s Russia Ties, Comey Confirms”

The Times: “Mr. Comey placed a criminal investigation at the doorstep of the White House and said officers would pursue it ‘no matter how long that takes.’”

Russell Berman in The Atlantic, March 20 headline: “It’s Official: The FBI Is Investigating Trump’s Links to Russia”

Jason Linkins in the Huffington Post, March 20: “we have a president under FBI investigation. How do you like that?” In an article headlined “Let’s Revisit All Those Times Trump Surrogates Said You Can’t Elect Someone Under FBI Investigation.”

Jack Moore in GQ, March 20 headline: “James Comey Confirms the FBI Is Investigating Trump’s Russian Connections”

Limelite, a blogger at DailyKos, March 20 headline: “Let’s Not Mince Words: Trump & Cohort Under FBI CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION.” Article: “The truth is that the facts are Director Comey is heading a criminal investigation into the past and present illegal activities of Donald Trump and a number of his former and present advisors whom he gathered to his 2016 presidential campaign. Let us be clear. Very clear. The FBI is not investigating of the basis of conspiracy theories, rumors, political axes to grind, or Russian propaganda. The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation based on factual evidence.”

LeftOfCenter, a blogger at Crooks & Liars, March 21 headline, quoting MSBNC’s Joe Scarborough: “On Election Day, Trump Was The ONLY ONE Under FBI Investigation, Not Hillary Clinton” More from Scarborough: “The FBI reports that there’s an investigation between the White House, the President’s campaign and collusion with Russia . . . ”