RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-thomas-and-the-plague-of-bad-reporting-propublica-washington-post-disclosure-court-safety-def0a6a7?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

By James Taranto

ProPublica’s big scoop turned out to be a quarter-teaspoon. In an error-filled report last week, the opinionated news site got one point right: Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t disclose the 2014 sale of his one-third interest in three Savannah, Ga., properties to a company controlled by his friend Harlan Crow. He was legally required to do so. On these pages, in an article published online Sunday, I observed that he may have to amend his financial-disclosure form for that year.

On Monday, “a source close to Thomas” told CNN that the justice would do so. “The source said . . . it was an oversight not to report the real estate transaction. Thomas believed he didn’t have to disclose because he lost money on the deal, according to the source.” It is the justice’s share of the sale price ($1,000 or more), not a profit, that triggers the statutory obligation to report.

How big a deal is it to amend a form after missing a disclosure? Consider these examples, which reader Darin Bartram dug up:

• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2012 disclosure amended her 2011 report, which “inadvertently omitted” the sale of shares in an exchange-traded fund that she had bought earlier the same year. “The Value Code should of [sic] been L and the Gain Code should of [sic] been A,” the amendment says.

• Ginsburg amended her 2017 disclosure to reflect that she had “inadvertently omitted” a gift of an opera costume worth $4,500.

• Justice Stephen Breyer reported in an amended 2018 disclosure that he had “inadvertently omitted” two stock sales by his wife, one in 2006 and one in 2018.

• In February 2022, three days after President Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson amended her 2020 disclosure to note that in various years between 2011 and 2021 she had “inadvertently omitted” travel reimbursements for two speaking trips, a university teaching salary, four nonprofit board memberships, her husband’s consulting income and a 529 college savings plan. No senator mentioned these omissions at her confirmation hearings.

https://thespectator.com/topic/media-tows-national-security-state-narrative-leak-ukraine-russia/?utm_source=Spectator%20

The tacit alliance between operatives of the national security state and corporate media burst into view last week when the New York Times and the Washington Post did the FBI’s job for it by tracking down the leaker of documents that detailed, among other things, the extent of American and allied involvement in the Ukraine war. 

That Bellingcat, the shadowy, government-funded open-source intelligence group, played a role in helping to identify the twenty-one-year-old Air National Guardsmen Jack Teixeira proves (once again) that many media outlets are now de facto agents of the national security state.

The idea that these open-source sleuths at Bellingcat, the Times and the Post are simply reporters acting in good faith is belied by their long history of, in the case of the Washington Post’s Evan Hill, writing a hatchet job on an American combat veteran turned politician, and Bellingcat’s subterfuge in the service of a cold war against Russia and a hot war against Syria.

The leaked documents show beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Biden administration, from the president on down, has been rather less than truthful about the war in Ukraine. Yet instead of taking the administration to task for, as some critics have charged, recklessly prolonging the war, the media has worked overtime to shift the focus from what revelations the documents contain to the identity of the leaker. 

There was a time when journalists in this country treated official pronouncements with skepticism and saw their role as challenging entrenched interests. Today, as the Teixeira story shows, they work to protect those interests — as those interests align with their anonymous sources inside the national security apparatus. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-tale-of-two-online-giants/

There are few more elaborate examples of the contemporary leftist capture of institutions than the metamorphosis of Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and influential encyclopedia in human history and the seventh most frequently consulted website on earth, from a relatively objective source of information into a massive assemblage of progressive agitprop. When it was founded in 2001 by two self-styled libertarians, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia – which is currently based at 120 Kearny Street, San Francisco, just off Market Street – was a self-consciously noble enterprise, conceived as a benign collaboration among unpaid volunteers and solemnly committed to truth and neutrality. In a 2021 interview, Sanger recalled that during its first few years, Wikipedia’s articles, even on the most controversial politicians and issues, were models of balance.

No more. “Especially over the last five years or so,” lamented Sanger, “Wikipedia has changed” although theoretically anyone can rewrite a Wikipedia entry to eliminate bias, left-wing administrators and editors labor endlessly to prevent and undo such changes. Sanger noted that the entry for Joe Biden, for example, mentions “very little by way of the concerns that the Republicans have had about him”; although there’s a paragraph about the Ukraine scandal, it “reads like a defense counsel’s brief.”

But don’t dare to call Wikipedia biased. To do so is “incorrect.” Wikipedia itself says so, in an emphatic little essay that lays down its party line on this question. It’s not possible for Wikipedia to be biased, you see, because it draws “only on reliable sources” – a “methodology” that ensures it will contain only “knowledge that is verifiable.” And what are those “reliable sources”? Well, on Wikipedia you can find an exhaustive list of sources in which it meticulously separates the sheep from the goats. And to peruse that list is to see news outlets being judged not, as Wikipedia would have you believe, by journalistic professionalism, but rather by the degree to which they can be relied upon to put a progressive spin on the facts.

https://reason.com/2023/04/12/the-media-and-politicians-keep-trying-to-censor-things-that-turn-out-to-be-true/

Over the past three years, we reporters learned there were certain things that we weren’t allowed to say. Not long ago, in fact, my new video may have been censored.

One dangerous idea, we were told, was that COVID-19 might have been created in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That seems very possible, since the institute studied coronaviruses in bats, and America’s National Institutes of Health gave the lab money to perform “gain-of-function” research, experiments where scientists try to make a virus more virulent or transmissible.

A Washington Post writer worried the lab leak theory “could increase racist attacks against Chinese people and further fuel anti-Asian hate.”

The establishment media fell in line, insisting that COVID most likely came from a local market that sold animals.

Left-wing TV mocked the lab theory as a “fringe idea” that came from “a certain corner of the right.”

“This coronavirus was not manmade,” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, confidently, “That is not a possibility.”

Not even a possibility?

Debate about it, we were told, posed a new threat: misinformation.

Facebook banned the lab leak theory, calling it a “false claim.”

But now the U.S. Department of Energy says the pandemic most likely came from a lab leak. FBI director Christopher Wray now says the origin of the pandemic is “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2023/04/03/is-this-wapos-worst-fact-check-yet-n2621465

Questionable fact-checks that are almost certainly partisan in nature are nothing new from The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. They may as well be par for the course at this point. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the ability to stun once in a while though, as he did when it comes to a fact-check on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicting former and potentially future President Donald Trump.

“The incendiary claim that George Soros ‘funded’ Alvin Bragg,” read the headline. Though it was published and updated on April 1, it does not appear to have been an April Fool’s Day joke, as Kessler doubled down. In response to reaction over Twitter, and even being slapped with a message for added context that actually fact-checked the fact-checker, Kessler remained stubborn.

Kessler’s fact-check took issues with claims from Trump that Bragg is “handpicked and funded by George Soros,” though it’s worth reminding that Trump is hardly the only person to raise such a connection when highlighting the DA’s–and others like him–soft-on-crime positions. Though Kessler is fact-checking Trump’s specific remarks, he goes on to acknowledge that others have picked up on it, though it could very well be to throw the party as a whole under the bus. 

As the fact-check claims:

But the intense focus on Soros is misplaced. Soros never directly funded Bragg, but instead contributed to a group that supported Bragg and other liberal candidates seeking to be prosecutors.

Moreover, the repeated mention of Soros plays into antisemitic conspiracy theories that Soros, a Hungarian American Holocaust survivor, is a wealthy puppet-master who works behind the scenes to manipulate elections and further his goals. The Anti-Defamation League found in 2018 that Soros figures in a significant number of antisemitic tweets.

The Trump campaign defended Trump’s focus on Soros. “It’s not antisemitic to point out Soros funded/supported Bragg,” said spokesman Steven Cheung. “What world are you living in?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/trans_man_kills_six_in_christian_school_and_msm_blameschristians.html

On March 27, a “trans man” shot and killed six people in a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. “He” took the lives of three children and three adults, mostly females. This was obviously a targeted assault. The slaughter stopped when policemen shot and killed the perpetrator.

The media did not much decry the actions of the deranged mass murderer, preferring to cast her/him as a victim of Christian intolerance. Some Christians don’t believe in self-mutilation, you see. Some have the audacity to believe in the existence of only two—count them—two sexes. Moreover, the perp’s parents apparently were not in favor of their daughter becoming a man. So, he/she had no choice but to slaughter innocent strangers, kids included. Duh!

The mainstream media is berserk. Insane. Rabid. It has eschewed all notion of impartiality, objectivity, truth, balance, and decency…in favor of doing absolutely anything to advance a Marxist, globalist, elitist, anti-freedom agenda. Absolutely anything. Journalists’ crazed virtue-signaling, hypocrisy, and dripping disdain for traditional values and the notion of American exceptionalism is embarrassing—and nauseating—to anyone with a modicum of intelligence, independence, self-awareness, and dignity.

The media reflexively blames guns, Christians, and America itself for mass shootings like this one. It never examines the devastation wrought by the progressive policies it champions that, in addition to causing economic collapse, coerce people into thinking of themselves as victims while simultaneously telling them that there is no God, their country is evil, and the planet is about to spontaneously combust.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/therefore-what/

“If a person progressives like is attacked, then that must be the result of conservatives speaking or voting or living as they see fit. And if a person progressives like is an attacker, then that must be the fault of the result of conservatives speaking or voting or living as they see fit. Whatever happens, the same people get blamed. It’s revolting.”

Per Ari Blaff, Terry Moran said the following on television yesterday:

ABC News anchor Terry Moran mischaracterized the legislation and implied it may have been related to the attack.

“The shooter identified herself as a transgender person. The state of Tennessee earlier this month passed and the governor signed a bill that banned transgender medical care for minors as well as a law that prohibited adult entertainment as well as male and female impersonators after a series of drag show controversies in that state.”

I would like to know what is supposed to come next in Moran’s sequence. The shooter was transgender; Tennessee had passed some laws she didn’t like; therefore . . .

Therefore what? Therefore what happened makes sense? Therefore she had no choice but to murder some nine-year-olds? Therefore the State of Tennessee is guilty in some sense? What?

I’d like to know why these facts were raised as they were. Because, to be quite honest with you, I cannot see an innocent explanation for Moran’s having juxtaposed them with the news he was relaying. Certainly, we can quibble over the scale of Moran’s implication, but there seems little doubt that his words were explanatory in nature.

And, unless such explanations are followed by immediate condemnation — which Moran’s were not — that’s a pretty massive problem, isn’t it? Elsewhere yesterday, an NBC reporter named Benjamin Ryan tweeted that “NBC has ID’d the Nashville school shooter as [], 28, who identifies as transgender and had no previous criminal record. Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro and @MichaelJKnowles.”

Okay. Therefore what? Therefore Walsh, Shapiro, and Knowles are ultimately responsible? Therefore the shooter should have targeted those people instead? Therefore what? I’d like to know.