http://edgar1981.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/understanding-media-terminology-for.html?m=1 Thanks to William Narvey
The premier rule governing those who practice medicine is apparently not applicable to reporters for the New York Times. Sharon Otterman has the byline for an article detailing the arrest of David H. Newman, distinguished Mt. Sinai physician and author, on charges of sexually abusing two patients in the emergency room at different times.(”Colleagues Express Disbelief Over Arrest of Doctor with Picture-Perfect Life,” NYT 1/21) The reporter goes on to give the dates and circumstances of each patient’s story, one having occurred on Jan 12 and one elicited by a patient after hearing news of that event; her experience occurred the previous Sept. The Times article differs from all other coverage of this story in that Ms. Otterman felt it necessary to mention the full name of Dr. Newman’s wife, a practicing physician herself. She also felt the need to describe the house where the two live with their children as well as the town where it is located.
Needless to say, Dr. Newman has not been tried or convicted yet so we are not reading about a man guilty of the crime for which he has been arrested. We are possibly reading about an innocent man, wrongfully accused by a woman under the influence of morphine. The names of the two purported victims are withheld out of respect for their privacy. Why isn’t Dr. Newman’s wife afforded equal respect, both by Sharon Otterman and the Times editor who reviewed her article before publication?
In googling Ms. Otterman to gain some insight into what sort of reporter reveals irrelevant information including details of the wedding pictures of the accused, I found her own wedding announcement with the names of her bridegroom and parents. I won’t reveal them but will say that someone with the same name as Ms. Otterman’s mother has a pornographic website online. Yes, that’s irrelevant too.
Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s, once said that if his competition was drowning, “he’d stick a hose in his mouth.” A very American attitude toward life and winning, which hasn’t taken root in today’s Republican establishment standard-bearers. Odd, since it was Reagan who famously said, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War. We win. They lose” – or, more germane to the politics of 2016, quipped that he was reluctant to allow a government shutdown until one day he asked himself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
But almost as if Reagan never lived, the sad fact is that you almost always find Republican establishment types today parading around in the 1950s prom dress liberals hand them to wear – a mentality they’re encouraged in by conservative establishment pundits like Charles Krauthammer, or most particularly Peggy Noonan, when, in “A Rash Leader in a Grave Time” (12/18/15), knocking Trump, she says this:
[O]ne thing an effective leader must always do is know what can be misunderstood and guard against it, what can be misconstrued and used to paint you – and your followers – as bigoted. Leaders try hard not to let that happen. It is the due diligence of politics.
Whew! Coming from Ms. Noonan, I suppose this is the gold standard of establishment thinking. But what a way in which to define leadership or diligence. I remember Ms. Noonan sideswiping Sarah Palin (during McCain’s campaign?) with the comment that we need leaders who can think through problems. Reading this mush, you’re forced to ask – what manner of thinking through does it take to conclude that effective leadership requires one not to say that which can be “misconstrued and used to paint you—and your followers—as bigoted”? News flash: Democrats always misconstrue and paint Republicans as bigoted. It’s what they do, the fetid air they thrive on. Indeed, there’s nothing Republicans can say, ever, that Democrats won’t misconstrue or lie about. Pretending there is just means you allow the left to control the debate.
They fell hard for the job-creating Führer with eyes that were like ‘blue larkspur.’ Why did so many journalists spend years dismissing the evidence of his atrocities?
“The train arrived punctually,” a Christian Science Monitor report from Germany informed its readers, not long after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. “Traffic was well regulated” in the new Germany, and policemen in “smart blue uniforms” kept order, the correspondent noted. “I have so far found quietness, order, and civility”; there was “not the slightest sign of anything unusual afoot.”
As for all those “harrowing stories” of Jews being mistreated—they seemed to apply “only to a small proportion”; most were “not in any way molested.” Overall, the Monitor’s dispatch declared, the Hitler regime was providing “a dark land a clear light of hope.”
Why did many mainstream American newspapers portray the Hitler regime positively, especially in its early months? How could they publish warm human-interest stories about a brutal dictator? Why did they excuse or rationalize Nazi anti-Semitism? These are questions that should haunt the conscience of U.S. journalism to this day.
Some of the U.S. press coverage of Hitler’s first weeks in power was rooted in unfamiliarity with the man and his movement. The Nazis had risen from barely 18 percent of the national vote in mid-1930 to become Germany’s largest party only two years later, and gained power just months after that. Knowing little about Hitler and Nazism, many American editors and reporters assumed, based on previous experience, that a radical candidate would show some restraint once in office.
It is intriguing that mainstream media has focused on violent terrorist acts of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), a radical Sunni Islamist group, while they are deliberately avoiding raising awareness about other Islamist terrorist groups that are as brutal as ISIS, if not worse.
The other groups that I am referring to are primarily the Iranian-backed radical Islamist militias.
Brutal terrorist groups such as Kataib al-Imam Ali (KIA) are not any less violent than ISIS when it comes to the aggressive and horrific tactics they use against civilians. In fact, they are known for showing videos of cut-off heads and bodies burned over open fires. This particular group, which is backed by Iran, originated from the Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Shebl al-Zaidi is the secretary-general of Kataib al-Imam Ali and he is known for his sectarian and vicious tactics.
Another militia group that is known locally for its violent attacks is Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. It reportedly receives approximately $2 million a month from the Islamic Republic.
There exist more than 100 of these Islamist terrorist groups and they are increasing on a daily basis as they branch out.
Colin Flaherty is the only two-time winner of the Washington Post’s Summer Spy Novel writing contest.
In its annual roundup of this year’s biggest lies and liars, the Washington Post forgot the largest liar of all: The writers and editors of the Washington Post.
We are of course talking about the Post’s recent decision to name the “hands up, don’t shoot’ campaign as one of its “Biggest Pinocchios of 2015.” But the collection of prevarications was curiously incomplete.
The Post reporter had no trouble identifying the biggest liars behind the other lies: Trump, Hillary, Kerry, Warren, whatever: The liars and lies were locked together.
Except for the biggest lie of all; the lie the Post left for last. The lie that took more ink, and went unchallenged by more professional skeptics than all the other lies put together. A lie that, apparently, told itself, because this was the only Pinocchio unmatched with a specific liar.
We are still a little under two months away from the first Presidential Primary. If you are listening to the mainstream media, the GOP nomination is all but sewn-up and the establishment Republican apparatus has agita. What’s got the inside-the-beltway crowd so nervous and frustrated? Well, Donald Trump is up 13.1 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls that survey the sentiments of Republican voters. This, in and of itself, is a good reason to break out the Prylosec® if you are an establishment Republican operative. But the GOP rank-and-file really needs to take a step back and understand what has been done to them so that they can truly have their voices heard come election time.
This election cycle has been unofficially titled the “Election of the Outsider” and rightly so. The public sentiment regarding politicians – especially the agenda-driven professional class of politician – is on par with that of journalists and lawyers. If the Mariana Trench could be filled with all of them the collective attitude of the nation would skyrocket. But what We the People are being led to believe is an “accurate accounting” of our collective sentiment has been manipulated to a great extent. Again, as in the non-vetting of Barack Obama in the lead-up to the 2008 General Election, the mainstream media is grossly negligent in doing its job.
While U.S. policymakers worry about the propaganda techniques of ISIS in drawing thousands of Islamists into the fight against the West, America’s adversaries in the Arab/Muslim world as a whole, as well as Russia and China, continue to make inroads into the U.S. media market. Indeed, on Thursday in Moscow, the premier Russian propaganda channel, RT (Russia Today), is holding a conference [1] marking its 10th anniversary as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda. President Obama’s former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is among the speakers at the event.
“RT aired its first broadcast on December 10, 2005,” says the promotional material. “Since then, the geopolitical chessboard has been rearranged and the news media scene welcomed many new voices.” However, these “new voices” are state-funded and controlled, in contrast to the privately-funded and independent news media organizations in the U.S.—which has a First Amendment—and other Western countries. The reference to the geopolitical chessboard being rearranged refers to the influence of government-financed media in Russia, China, and much of the Arab/Muslim world in changing perceptions of the United States.
The mainstream media has for years been in the business of justifying jihad terror and demonizing those who oppose it, but now it has reached an appalling new low.
Linda Stasi in the New York Daily News last Saturday portrayed jihad murderer Syed Rizwan Farook and his victim Nicholas Thalasinos as two sides of the same coin:
They were two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees interacting in one department. Now 13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage. … Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot.
Her equivalence founders, of course, on the simple and titanic fact that Farook was a mass murderer, while Thalasinos was never going to kill anyone.
But in her madness to justify the San Bernardino jihad murders, Stasi doesn’t bother to mention that.
Stasi is also too fastidious to provide the murderers’ names:
One man, the Muslim, was a loser who had to travel all the way to Pakistan to get himself an email bride. (I refuse to add to their fame by using the killer and his murderous wife’s names.)
But she doesn’t hesitate to defecate on the memory of the man Farook murdered.
Anchor asks Trump supporter the question in response to his recent controversial comments about banning Muslims.
In reported cases of terror attacks, should all Jews be barred from obtaining visas in order to enter the United States?
This was a question posed by CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield Tuesday morning during an interview with former Ronald Reagan White House administration official and current Donald Trump supporter, Jeffrey Lord, when asked if his preferred presidential candidate was not applying a double standard to Muslims.
“If you supplant the word ‘Jews’ for ‘Muslims’ in a lot of the rhetoric that we’ve had this morning, I think people would find it sort of cringe-worthy and reminiscent of a really ugly time in our history,” Banfield said. “There have been Jewish terrorist attacks. Should we therefore ask no Jews to please apply for a visa?”
The CNN anchor then provided specifics examples: “From a period of 1980 to 1985 there were a reported 18 terror attacks committed in the United States by Jews, 15 of them committed by the Jewish Defense League,” Banfield said. ‘The head of the Jewish Defense league was in jail awaiting trial…accused of trying to bomb a mosque in Culver City, trying to bomb [US Congressman] Darrel Issa’s office, an Arab-American.”
