RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/media-sneers-as-trump-meets-with-european-leader-who-vows-to-make-the-west-great-again/

Donald Trump was re-elected president in 2024, vowing to resume his struggle to end the hegemony of the leftist political elites and restore the government to the people. Those leftist elites aren’t in Washington alone; they’re also in Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, and most of the other capitals of Europe.

There is, however, a handful of notable exceptions: several European countries have leaders who care as much about their own people as Trump does about Americans, and who are working to end the left’s dominance and restore sane government. One of them, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, came to the White House last Thursday and had a cordial meeting with Trump.

Despite the fact that the U.S. visit of a European leader who declared herself to be entirely in agreement with Trump’s guiding philosophy was a significant event, establishment media coverage was sparse. What there was of it was notable for being even more sneering and condescending than usual.

The Washington Post focused its coverage before the Trump-Meloni meeting on the assumption, which turned out to be false, that Meloni was in Washington to conclude a trade deal with Trump on behalf of the European Union; its Wednesday story on the planned meeting was headlined “Europe pins trade hopes on Italy’s Meloni, its Trump whisperer.” Because, you see, the president of the United States is like an animal who can’t be communicated with in any ordinary way; a person with special talents for communicating with dumb beasts has to be called in. That’s how the left sees Trump.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-does-not-show-harrison-ford-making-pro-palestinian-speech-2024-05-08/

A video showing actor Harrison Ford talking about climate change at a United Nations summit in 2019 has been miscaptioned online as him making a pro-Palestinian speech.

The clip was falsely captioned online as students in universities across the U.S. protested, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from companies linked to Israel.

A social media post

, opens new tab sharing the video online said: “Harrison Ford is Pro-Palestine.”

VERDICT

Miscaptioned. The video shows Harrison Ford talking about the young people who want to protect the environment at the UN Climate Action Summit 2019.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/04/13/washington-posts-clinging-to-fake-story-reminds-us-what-the-media-really-is-n4938874

There couldn’t possibly be a clearer example of media perfidy and dishonesty: back in May 2017, the Washington Post published a story about how President Trump supposedly urged Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers to deny that there was any evidence that he had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. There was just one catch: the story was false, and Rogers said as much to the FBI as far back as June 2017. Yet not only did the Post not take the story down; it’s still up, eight years later and long after the Russian Collusion hoax has been definitively debunked.

The story was one of many in the Post about Trump’s much-publicized collusion with Russia that won the Post the Pulitzer Prize. And apparently that was all that mattered. Truth? Accuracy? Integrity? Come on, man! 

The story, along with the rest about the alleged Russian Collusion, sold papers, and made the WaPo seem as if it was once again on the cutting edge of investigative journalism. The Post was even fearlessly taking on a president of the United States, recalling the heady days of Watergate when Woodward and Bernstein bearded the wily Tricky Dick, became Redford and Hoffman, and made the Post into one of the leading newspapers in the left’s constellation of propaganda organs.

The opportunity to relive the glory days was apparently too much for the Post, and overrode all other considerations. As Matt Margolis noted Sunday, “it’s unclear whether the Post knew Rogers disputed their report before publishing it, but Rogers made it clear to investigators shortly afterward that the story was false.” 

Did Rogers, or the FBI, notify the Post also that the story was false? That is unclear, but the WaPo should have made it its business to know. It was, after all, a newspaper, and not just any newspaper, but one that was leading the covering of the allegations of collusion against the sitting president. Did the Post have no contact with Rogers despite the fact that its story was about him? Did it have no contacts in the FBI? Or was the story just too good, too damning of Trump, for the Post to be all that concerned about accuracy? 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/30/rhetoric-lies-and-the-media-a-quintilian-perspective-on-modern-journalism/

Where’s Quintilian when you need him? The author of the twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria (c. AD 95) knew all there was to know about rhetoric, “the art,” as Aristotle said, “of persuasion.” Quintilian’s chief concern was with turning out able and virtuous orators. But in the course of his inquiries, he also analyzed the workings of deceitful or fraudulent oratory. What a rich hunting ground our dishonest media today would have given the old Roman!

It is amusing to speculate on what Quintilian might have made of The New York Times, for example, a recent story in our former paper of record titled “Elon Musk Is South African. We Shouldn’t Forget It.” Musk left his native South Africa in the late 1980s. He never looked back. But according to the Times, Musk was irredeemably tainted by the racial policies of South Africa. He is, the Times  informed its readers, “a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa.” Really?

What follows is an extraordinary web of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies. Quintilian would have delighted in explaining how it all works.

He would also have found much to work with in “Trump’s Assault on Elites Encompasses Almost Every Aspect of American Life,” Stephen Collinson’s recent essay for CNN. Considered simply as an exercise in mendacious rhetoric, it deserves some sort of prize. I think of it as Mary McCarthy thought of Lillian Hellmann. When asked by Dick Cavett what she found to be dishonest about Hellmann, McCarthy said, “Everything. I once said in an interview that everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

So it is with Collinson’s flaccid but scuttling effort to attack Donald Trump.

https://thespectator.com/topic/pbs-npr-received-public-funding-hearing/

Congress has been mulling the future of publicly-funded television and radio. Here’s a spoiler alert: that funding is toast.

There is no way a Republican-controlled House and Senate will keep pouring money into networks they believe hate them. They know that hatred is warmly reciprocated.

The debate about partisan bias at PBS and NPR is important – the bias itself is obvious – but that’s not the most important point. What matters most is that democratic governments have no business funding or controlling news channels directed at their own citizens. Those channels should be privately owned and operated. Every single one. They should not only be private: they should be beyond the scope of government censorship and intimidation, the kind the Biden administration exerted on social media giants during Covid.

Why is it important to end public ownership of radio and TV networks? Because that is the best way to encourage robust debate about public policies. In a constitutional democracy like ours, the proper role of a government is to foster that public debate by 

Providing as much information as possible;
Avoiding the suppression of differing views unless they violate the law; and
Letting citizens and their elected representatives control the discourse without government interference, except to enforce the law

To facilitate that debate, public officials have a core responsibility: they should share information that citizens need. They should except only disclosures that would violate personal privacy or harm national security or ongoing law-enforcement operations. No one argues about this exception on privacy grounds. No one says those people abused by Jeffrey Epstein should be harmed again by the FBI releasing their names.