RUTHFULLY YOURS

Newscaster Bob Schieffer unwittingly demonstrated the depths his colleagues will descend to disparage President Trump at CNN.

Schieffer broke from the standard CNN narrative to remark that the president “actually” sounded “dignified and even presidential,” during his momentous speech before more than 50 Arab and Muslim leaders delivered recently in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Schieffer had gone too far in his faint praise of the president.

“You know, Bob,” said his on-air colleague John Berman, “There will be people who look at that last comment you made and say, you’re normalizing the president.” That was just the wind-up before landing the real punch: Berman mused aloud over making laudatory remarks about the president just “because he (Trump) met this admittedly very low bar for not sounding foolish.”

This time Berman wasn’t dealing the race card, but rather pulled out the character assassination card from the bottom of the deck. After all — you wouldn’t want to “normalize” a wife beater, or serial killer. Why would you think of “normalizing” the president? Liberal hysteria is now a national condition.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Schieffer wasn’t going to be shamed into marching back his remarks on President Trump: “I’m not trying to normalize him in any way,” Schieffer replied. “I’m trying to do what reporters do — report and try to emphasize what I think is important.”

Being an old-school journalist, Schieffer may be raising the bar for his colleagues at the Trump-bashing network. Sadly, in the end, Schieffer joined his colleagues at the cable channel in both condescending rhetoric and mean-spirited tone.

“He didn’t sound like the guy at the end of the bar popping off,” Schieffer added. “You may agree or disagree with what he said but he sounded like a president. This went over very well — mainly because he stayed on script. He sounded like someone who actually thought about what he was going to say before he said it. No tweets today.” Faint praise indeed.

Schieffer never veered too far off script himself: But, just for a moment, he actually sounded like he was a newscaster “trying to do what reporters do — report.”

Fake news is profitable.

The New York Times hit piece on the Comey memo earned the paper its most concurrent readers per second. Pretty good for a piece about a piece of paper that the leftist paper had never even seen and which was, supposedly, described to it by one of Comey’s associates.

But that didn’t stop it from racking up over 6 million views.

Media fake news isn’t just an agenda. It’s enormously profitable. Hit pieces powered by anonymous sources bring in over 100,000 readers in an age when live is king. For individual reporters, finding a source, real or fake, that can back up the left’s Trump conspiracy theories can put them on the map.

The Comey story comes from Michael Schmidt who made a name by supposedly finding documents relating to media claims of a “Haditha Massacre” in a Baghdad junkyard where “an attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.” It was dashing and also very convenient.

The claims didn’t hold up in court. Most of the Marine heroes who were dragged through the mud over Haditha had their cases dropped. One case dragged out and ultimately came out to very little. But the New York Times cashed in. And Schmidt did much better out of it than Cpl. Stephen Tatum.

Haditha was the Times’ discount version of Mai Lai. Now in a desperate effort to reclaim the glory days of the media left, the New York Times and the Washington Post are trying to recreate Watergate.

It’s no coincidence that many of the big vital hit pieces aimed at President Trump have come out of the Washington Post. At the end of last year, the paper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos went on a hiring spree. The goal was “quick turnaround investigative reporting”.

Washington Post editor Marty Baron explained, “We are creating a rapid response investigative team to do investigative stories more quickly, using a lot of the digital tools that are available to us now. We hugely value the longer, deeper investigations as well, but we want to supplement that with quicker investigations that can have an impact almost immediately.”

How do you do “quicker investigations”? How can you predict that an investigation will pay off rapidly? The best way to make sure that your investigation will quickly deliver a major story is to fake it.

Those quick investigative stories haven’t been coming from digital tools. They are based on anonymous sources. Real investigative reporting takes time. But a fake news story full of innuendo backed by a bunch of anonymous sources that repeat what “everyone” in the media already knows is true, is quick.

That’s what having “an impact almost immediately” means. You don’t do the hard work. You fake it.

The Washington Post has racked up viral hit fake news stories backed by anonymous sources. And it’s paying off. The Post claimed a traffic increase of 50% at the end of last year with a 75% increase in new subscribers. The official line is that Jeff Bezos has transformed the Post’s digital strategy. The reality was conveyed by its new anti-Trump slogan. “Democracy dies in darkness.” The silly slogan was an exercise in branding. It announced that this was the paper of choice for “researched” attacks on Trump.

Now the Post has hit $100 million in digital revenues and added hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. All of this is quite a change from a few years ago when the Post was losing $50 million a year and Baron was talking about shrinking the newsroom.

“The legacy media’s institutional left-wing bias has always been obvious, but it’s never been quite this sickening.”

On Wednesday, investigative news site Circa News broke a blockbuster story about illegal spying during the Obama years. So far, only Fox News and a handful of conservative websites have covered the bombshell news. According to Newsbusters, the big three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — have completely omitted the story from their evening broadcasts. So have the Washington Post, the New York Times, and every other major mainstream media outlet. They’ve opted instead to cover RussiaGate fodder that continues to bear little fruit and negative news about Donald Trump.

“Trump shoved someone in Brussels today!” every mainstream media news outlet in America reported ad nauseam on Thursday.

In their report, Circa revealed that “the National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall.”

“More than one in 20 internet searches conducted by the National Security Agency, involving Americans, during the Obama administration violated constitutional privacy protections,” Fox News’ Bret Baier reported near the top of Special Report Wednesday evening. “And that practice went on for years. Not only that, but the Obama administration was harshly rebuked by the FISA court for doing it.”

Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen cut to the chase: “On the day President Obama visited Los Angeles last October to yuk it up with Jimmy Kimmel, lawyers for the National Security Agency were quietly informing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that NSA had systematically violated the rights of countless Americans.”

Via Newsbusters:

“Declassified documents, first obtained by the news site Circa, show the FISA court sharply rebuked the administration,” Rosen noted as he began to read a passage from the FISA court’s opinion. “’With greater frequency than previously disclosed to the Court, NSA analysts had used U.S. person identifiers to query the results of internet ‘upstream’ collection, even though NSA’s Section 702 minimization procedures prohibited such queries.’”

The Fox News reporter was intrigued by the documents because: “These disclosers are timely though, as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—one of the primary means by which U.S. citizens are caught up in incidental surveillance—is up for reauthorization, Bret, by the Congress at year’s end.”

John Soloman, one of the Circa reporters who broke the story, talked with Rosen and told him that “tonight, for the first time, we can say confidently that there’s been a finding that some of that espionage, that spying on Americans, actually violated the law.”

The condemning evidence seemed to have no end, as Rosen reported that:

The documents show it was back in 2011 that the FISA court first determined NSA’s procedures to be, quote, “statutorily and constitutionally deficient with respect to their protection of U.S. person information.” Five years later, two weeks before Election Day, the judges learned that NSA had never adequately enacted the changes it had promised to make. The NSA inspector general and its office of compliance for operations “have been conducting other reviews covering different time periods,” the judges noted, “with preliminary results suggesting that the problem is widespread during all periods of review.”

Rosen had also mentioned how “the judges blasted NSA’s ‘institutional ‘lack of candor’’ and added ‘This is a very serious fourth amendment issue.’” CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump creates many of his own problems, but sometimes he can’t win no matter what he does. Consider the uproar on Thursday because the President supposedly did not explicitly endorse NATO’s Article 5 commitment that an attack on one ally is an attack on all.

Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and beating heart of the U.S. diplomatic establishment, followed Mr. Trump’s speech with a Twitter barrage that included: “Every US President since Truman has pledged support for Article 5—that US will defend Europe. Not so Trump today at #NATO. Major mistake.” The herd of independent media minds then stampeded with the theme that Mr. Trump had deliberately failed to commit the U.S. to defending Europe against attack.

But is that really what happened? Mr. Trump was speaking, briefly, at an event at NATO headquarters in Brussels unveiling the Article 5 and Berlin Wall Memorials. The Article 5 Memorial commemorates the only time that NATO has triggered Article 5, which came after al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. on 9/11. The Memorial includes a remnant of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Here is what Mr. Trump said in the third paragraph of his speech: “This ceremony is a day for both remembrance and resolve. We remember and mourn those nearly 3,000 innocent people who were brutally murdered by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Our NATO allies responded swiftly and decisively, invoking for the first time in its history the Article 5 collective defensive commitments.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/447934/print
‘It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn.’
By Rich Lowry

The New York Times has a new blockbuster™ story this afternoon on Russian officials talking about trying to influence Trump aides, but there’s always a caveat in these kind of reports that makes them more smoke as opposed to a smoking gun. In the case of the Times piece, it is the above sentence. (And even if the Russian officials did try to influence them, that still leaves us short of collusion.)

This new special edition of The Glazov Gang featured Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and editor ofThe Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Fake News’ War on Trump, unveiling the Left’s psychotic rage and fantasy world.http://jamieglazov.com/2017/05/23/fake-news-war-on-trump-on-the-glazov-gang/

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch the special episode of The Glazov Gang that featured Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Peterson shared his views on Non-Traditional Gender Pronouns, unveiling the dire consequences of the control of language now reaching the legislative level in Canada:

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