RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/democracy-under-siege

The impending collapse of democracy—that’s not small beer. So imagine the alarm of New York Times subscribers when, on October 3, an essay titled “Democracy Challenged” appeared in the newspaper with the subhead, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.”

If the New York Times wishes to limit gun ownership in America, articles like this can hardly be said to help. Before leaving the house the day the article was published, I opened our front door as slowly as I could, motioned to the family to stay in place until I had peered up both ends of the street, and then instructed everyone to walk behind me as we all moved as noiselessly as possible toward the sidewalk and our several destinations. “Do what you can to save representative democracy in America!” my wife whispered to the kids as they set off for school.

I am joking, of course. The piece, written by Joseph Kahn, the paper’s new executive editor, appeared in what the Times calls “The Morning Newsletter.” Though this morning’s item concerned the country’s worst nightmare, it was only four paragraphs long. And it was hard to fathom. The subhead’s reference to the most serious “threats” to “representative government” “in decades” was perplexing, since any real threat to democracy would be deadly and single, not one among several competing threats. And there was no threat to American democracy decades ago, unless Kahn was referring to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were threats of a whole different order than what he went on to claim were the perils faced by American democracy now.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/19/david-french-yes-the-dispatch-takes-money-to-help-leftists-keep-the-internet-conservatism-free/

David French, the “principled conservative” who argued drag queen story hours in libraries are “blessings of liberty,” publicly confirmed last week that he’s personally advised Big Tech platforms on how to suppress the speech of people who disagree with leftists.

“A few years ago I was invited to an off-the-record meeting with senior executives at a major social media company,” reads the Atlantic contributor and Dispatch senior editor’s first sentence. In 2020, The Dispatch became a paid censor to help Facebook suppress conservative ideas using the pretense of “factchecking.”

As a Facebook censor, The Dispatch has helped suppress true information in the service of leftist conversation control. This has included keeping accurate pro-life ads off Facebook in a way that protected the candidacy of Joe Biden and restricted nonviolent political speech. Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes also defended Facebook’s 2020 election interference in the form of throttling a true story about Hunter Biden’s corruption that may financially benefit his father.

Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program in 2016. By 2020, more than 50 publications including French’s The Dispatch agreed to do Big Tech’s dirty censorship work. Throttlers like The Dispatch are tasked by Facebook “reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users.”

The Dispatch claims to be a center-right media organization. It called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, a position opposed by the vast majority of Republican voters.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/16/corporate-media-can-stomp-and-cry-all-it-wants-its-special-twitter-privileges-are-ending/

Corporate media ‘journalists’ are crying like children because they no longer get special permission to dox their political enemies.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, corporate journalists freely persecuted their political enemies by posting their identities and locations to enable in-person harassment, but not anymore. This week, Musk decided he’s no longer allowing anyone, including journalists, to jeopardize people’s safety via Twitter, and he began temporarily suspending the accounts of offending members of the press. 

“Everyone’s going to be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.

The crackdown on doxxing is personal for Twitter’s CEO. On Wednesday, Musk reported that his 2-year-old son named “X” was followed by a “crazy stalker” who had mistaken X for Musk. According to Musk, the stalker blocked the car driving his son and “climbed onto the hood.” The incident motivated Musk to suspend several high-profile journalists guilty of doxxing.

This caused the corporate media to fly into hysterics. “Elon Musk censors the press,” said one CNN headline.” “[U]nprecedented,” stated the flabbergasted Axios. “Twitter suspends journalists who wrote about owner Elon Musk,” alleged The Associated Press. “Musk has begun banning journalists who have criticized him on Twitter,” whined Washington Post TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz.

All this outrage is performative. Firstly, Musk made it clear why the journalists are suspended, and it’s not because they “criticized” him, as Lorenz said. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” wrote Musk.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/what-twitter-files-say-future-journalism

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to share internal records with a trio of independent journalists spawned stories about how Twitter executives worked to invent justifications for content decisions they’d already made on ideological grounds.

But it also feeds into a story about how Twitter itself, and other platforms, like the subscription service Substack, have decentralized the media so effectively that individual voices can drive the news in ways once reserved for legacy outlets .

Journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger each combed through reams of Twitter emails, message chains from the workplace communication tool Slack, and screenshots to publish five sets of analyses on Twitter. Their final products took the form of lengthy Twitter threads about how Twitter suppressed stories on Hunter Biden’s business dealings during the 2020 election and how the company ultimately decided to ban former President Donald Trump permanently.

The journalists all had several things in common: They all run popular Substack pages, they have all written pieces in the past for legacy media outlets like the New York Times, and they all have large Twitter followings.

The least-followed of the three, Shellenberger, still had more than 357,000 Twitter followers before he posted his batch of the so-called Twitter Files. He now has more than 480,000. Taibbi started December with less than 750,000 Twitter followers and now boasts more than 1.5 million.

And perhaps most importantly, all three have been outspoken about what they see as the excesses of the Left on cultural issues such as speech and corporate influence.

“To me, the media’s response to the Twitter Files is itself a scandal,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/13/abc-cbs-and-other-corporate-media-black-out-coverage-of-twitter-files-story/

Corporate media outlets have all but refused to cover the unfolding “Twitter Files” published by independent journalists including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi throughout the last week. According to Grabien, a news clipping and transcribing service, a search of its database finds that among the three major networks — ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News — the words “Twitter Files” have been discussed on air a collective total of one time since Dec. 2, the day Elon Musk announced the release of the first batch.

When it comes to cable network coverage, CNN and MSNBC have mentioned the words “Twitter Files” just 13 times and 17 times, respectively, since Dec. 2, compared to Fox News’s 374 mentions of the keywords. A Monday search on CNN’s website for “Twitter Files” turns up zero search results for any coverage of the independent journalists’ ongoing investigations.

The media blackout is odd, considering that the first five parts of the ongoing series have covered some of the corporate media’s previously favorite topics such as the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and Twitter’s subsequent banning of former President Donald Trump, which have received in-depth coverage for the last two years.

Other significant findings uncovered in the documents Musk turned over to Weiss and Taibbi include the role former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker played in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the tech company’s frequent secret meetings with federal intelligence agencies in the run-up to the 2020 election. While most Americans are not frequent users of Twitter, the company’s relationship with government intelligence agencies and its apparent influence on federal elections is undeniably worthy of major network coverage.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/left-wing-journalists-are-truly-some-of-the-worst-people-on-the-planet/

Think what you will of Donald Trump – personally, I could use a break from hearing about and from him – no one did more to expose the hypocrisy of the left than he did, and he didn’t actually do anything to cause it except to exist. Hillary Clinton was supposed to win in 2016, breaking the “glass ceiling” and ushering in an era of GOP destruction. Instead, she lost to this “monster,” setting off Democrats, both with and without press passes, into a rage-spiral that not only hasn’t stopped, but has only sped up. That included “conservatives” who seem to resent political victories they claimed they always wanted simply because they were done on his watch.

Donald Trump didn’t make them insane, his existence simply sped up the process – pulling back the curtain, or actually pulling the curtain and the rod off the wall completely. I truly despise them.

The reason for the title is watching these people “cover” the revelations of Twitter’s internal deliberations and actions on the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election is something to behold that should make everyone sick, I know it does me. I won’t go so far as to say it would have changed the outcome of the election, but to pretend it couldn’t have is asinine. And the people pretending otherwise deserve a swift smack across the face with the cold, dead fish of reality, if only metaphorically.

But viewers and readers of the leftist media wouldn’t have any idea of the story at all. CBS News didn’t bother covering it at all. The Washington Post and New York Times burned their calories downplaying collusion between government and soon to be government officials and the silencing of a media outlet’s major story because they’re on the other team.

https://quillette.com/2022/12/06/at-last-mainstream-journalists-are-starting-to-report-the-truth-about-youth-gender-clinics/

The rise of youth gender clinics in Western nations has presented a case study in the dysfunction of mainstream media. Famous mastheads and broadcasters, especially those regarded as progressive, have failed to cover major stories in this area, bungled those they have covered, and ignored scientific evidence that conflicts with the demand that self-identified gender must trump biological sex in all areas of policy-making (a system of beliefs often described as gender ideology). Interested news consumers have been left to sift through the uneven reporting on this subject that takes place on social media, where gold nuggets of truth intermingle freely with misinformation.

Yet many people still believe that it’s worthwhile to critique journalists who cover (or, more commonly, fail to cover) this topic, in the hope that they will ultimately choose to do their job properly. And there are good practical reasons for doing so. As with other specialized issues, if the mass media doesn’t cover it, only a small minority of (typically web-savvy) people will make it their business to educate themselves. And while New York Times coverage alone won’t dissuade a non-binary girl from a double mastectomy or other irreversible medical steps, Times reporting can get the attention of those elite policymakers—in politics, health care, and academia—who’ve legitimized and facilitated the medicalised transition of a fast-expanding group of minors.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/05/media-tailspin-continues-as-trust-hits-record-lows-ii-tipp-poll/

With mass layoffs at a number of companies and new revelations of intervention in recent elections, the media have had a rough two months. Now, it gets even rougher. According to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll, trust in the media has now fallen to record lows.

Each month, the I&I/TIPP Poll asks respondents two questions: “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?”

Then the same question is asked about the “alternative media,” which includes less-mainstream outlets, the New York Post, Washington Times, News Max, The Daily Caller, and Real Clear Politics, among others.

For both sets of media, the news is not good.

In the case of the traditional media, just 33% of poll respondents said they either had a “lot of trust” (12%) or “quite a bit of trust” (21%) in these outlets. But the “No trust” group totaled 61%, with 32% expressing “little trust” and 29% “no trust at all.”