RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/21/walter-duranty-would-be-proud-of-the-way-the-press-covered-for-biden/

Five years too late, the Wall Street Journal finally reports – when it no longer matters – what journalists knew all along but covered up: Joe Biden was not mentally fit to be president.

The mainstream media’s disservice to the public ranks right up there with Walter Duranty’s New York Times reporting, in which he fed Soviet Union propaganda to the U.S. as news and helped cover up the hellscape that was Stalin’s Russia. (The New York Times never returned the Pulitzer Prize that Duranty won for his lies.)

Except in this case, it wasn’t one reporter halfway around the world in a closed society. It was a legion of reporters inside the White House.

The Journal report reads as though it’s the result of hard investigative work. “This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations,” it says.

Bullsh-t.

The Journal’s story is just a catalog of what reporters knew – or must have known – all along but refused to tell the public.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/after-the-biden-revelations-of-what-value-is-the-mainstream-political-media/

When did you first figure out that something was wrong with Joe Biden — seriously wrong, not just in the “bit older, bit slower” way, but in that genuine “oh man, this guy ain’t gonna make it” way? I know many of our readers will be eager to claim the earliest date possible, because we’ve all heartily loathed the man as president for four years, and I doubt any of us liked his vice presidency either. (A tip of the cap to any keen-memoried old-timer who nominates 1987 as the year when Joe Biden actually first truly “lost it.”)

For my part, it came as an instantaneous, shuddering revelation when I saw him address the nation on August 16, 2021, as he inattentively slurred through his eagerly awaited Afghanistan withdrawal speech. I’ve already told this story once — in one of the most alarmingly Cassandra-like pieces I will ever write, one I specifically recall being laughed off by many of my more left-leaning acquaintances as “right-wing fever-swamp nonsense.” Permit me an excerpt:

Instead it was Biden’s demeanor that shocked me: slurred words, a sleepy and distracted tone suggesting periodic loss of mental focus, and his visibly withered face and slump-shouldered bearing. The whole time, I was cringing with an embarrassed empathy that comes not from politics but rather from that human reserve of mercy and shame we all share. He’d already looked slow and out of it during the (abbreviated) 2020 campaign, but his rapid slide since only a year before jarred me. It was ugly and unfortunate to see him looking lost and frail during the speech — the ricketiness of our president revealed to the world, sacrificing not only his own dignity but our national dignity as well. I wanted to turn away, to turn it off. It hurt to watch. It was at that moment that I concluded Joe Biden wasn’t going to be his party’s nominee for president in 2024.

https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-threat-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.

Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”

While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/abc-pays-the-price-for-george-stephanopouloss-partisan-irresponsibility/

The fickle gods of irony are at work on this one.

As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.

Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.

It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library! (To complete the victory, ABC will also cover Donald Trump’s attorneys’ fees, a concession that surely occasioned an enormous sigh of relief from Donald Trump’s attorneys.)

The instigating event actually took place on March 10, when South Carolina representative Nancy Mace appeared on ABC’s This Week, a show that, while I was growing up in the D.C. area, was distinguished by the precise, elegantly patrician demeanor of its host, David Brinkley. Brinkley was famous as one of the last news anchors to insist on writing all of his own copy, which is why it bore such a distinct tone.

Nowadays This Week is the province of diminutive ex–hatchet man George Stephanopoulos, a nasty little Dökkálfr who graduated from slandering groped women on behalf of Bill Clinton and his “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign to gently condescending to the nation in a grizzled sneer on Good Morning America — and did all this so quickly that nobody ever stopped to point out that he simulates genuine human warmth as convincingly as AI depicts floor gymnastics. Stephanopoulos has never pretended to be a journalist: He is a Democratic partisan who holds his position because of his unthreatening height and professional connections with establishment power brokers, not his insight or tendency to ask probing questions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/12/whatever-the-atlantic-is-paying-jonathan-chait-its-too-much/

We are not in the habit of reading Jonathan Chait’s bloated regurgitations, but the headline on his latest column in The Atlantic — “The Bizarre Normalcy of Trump 2.0” — intrigued us because only a leftist could describe the orderly and upbeat transition that is happening right now as “bizarre.”

To Chait, what’s bizarre is that people on the left aren’t freaking out more because “what is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing.”

A prime example, Chait says, is Trump’s appointment of Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department, which, he says, highlights “the banal ubiquity of authoritarian thinking in the Trumpified Republican Party.”

What he says next is one of the purest, most unadulterated forms of projection we’ve ever come across.

Here’s what he writes about Anton:

Anton is best known for an essay published eight years ago called ‘The Flight 93 Election.’ In it, he argued that conservatives should support Trump, despite their serious reservations about his character, because another Democratic term in office would amount to the death of the republic. (Hillary Clinton, like the 9/11 hijackers, would steer the country toward the equivalent of a fiery demise.) At the time, Anton’s argument stood out for its existential tone and hysterical life-and-death metaphor. Now his logic — that permitting Democrats to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide, the prevention of which justifies any measures, legal or otherwise — is a required belief for service in the power ministries. Once an oddball, Anton is just another Trump bureaucrat who subscribes to the party’s rule-or-perish ideology. (emphasis added)

Say what?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/journalists-mourn-that-jack-smiths-probes-are-dead/

Democratic attorneys waged legal war on former President Donald Trump on every level of government: federal, state, county and city. Now that he’s been reelected, all that legal wrangling is going to be curtailed. Biden-appointed special counsel Jack Smith had to fold his tent, and on Nov. 25, the networks offered live “breaking news” that just sounded like they were the broken ones.

Start with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, whose third anti-Trump book was aggressively titled “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party.” That’s a little embarrassing for Karl and his publishers now that the GOP controls the White House, Congress and 55% of state legislative seats.

Karl decried the death of accountability for Trump: “He ultimately will not be held to account in the criminal court system for his actions to overturn the presidential election of 2020.” Karl is upset that the Orange Man isn’t in an orange jumpsuit. No jail, no justice!

CBS reporter Scott MacFarlane, whose primary beat for almost four years now has been treating Jan. 6 as worse than 9/11, was also upset: “The historic case against Donald Trump for allegations he tried to conspire to overturn an election and the ties to that horrific attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, that case is dying with a whimper today.”

This pro-prosecutor tone was not the MacFarlane spin when the Bidens were the ones being investigated. He overused the adverb “allegedly” to describe pictures of Hunter Biden’s rampant drug use when he was on trial. He lamented special counsel Robert Hur “controversially” stated President Joe Biden would appear too doddering to be convicted in his classified-documents case. Who was whimpering instead of holding politicians accountable then?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/29/election-be-damned-googles-anti-trump-bias-is-alive-and-well/

Donald Trump may have overwhelmingly won reelection, but according to Google’s content police, saying anything nice about him is “demonstrably false” and a threat to the “democratic process.”

Do you think we’re exaggerating?

We received notice the other day that our article “Unburdened By What Has Been, Trump Is Poised To Deliver Bigly” contained, according to Google, “unreliable and harmful claims.”

What falls into this category? Content that:

makes claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.
promotes harmful health claims, or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus.
contradicts authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.

Google didn’t, and never does, provide any specific information on what exactly violated these standards or what a “fix” would entail. But it did strip its ads from that page, costing us money.

So, we decided to try to figure out on our own what the violation was. There were no health claims or mention of “climate change,” so it has to be the first bullet above.

What was “demonstrably false”?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/27/is-pro-kamala-harris-bias-during-2024-election-destroying-the-big-media-ii-tipp-poll/

If you want to know why big media outlets are struggling so badly, you only need to look at the coverage of this month’s presidential election. Not only were the media perceived by voters as favoring Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris, but they continued to show an erosion in Americans’ overall trust in them as sources of information, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The November national online poll includes 1,436 adults, with a +/-2.6 percentage point margin of error.

Each month, I&I/TIPP asks voters the following questions about the national media:

“Generally speaking, 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?”

And, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

Respondents are given a number of possible responses to both questions, including: “A lot of trust,” “Quite a bit of trust,” “Little trust,” “No trust at all,” and “Not sure.”

In keeping with the recent trend, the overall trust picture for the media is not a pretty one to behold.