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MEDIA

Why the Nashville Christian School Shooting Is About to Disappear from the News Cycle Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/03/27/of-course-you-all-know-why-the-liberal-media-is-going-to-smother-the-nashville-shooting-n2621182

Julio has been covering the tragedy in Nashville, Tennessee. Six people, three children, and three adult staffers, were shot and killed at the Covenant School, a private Christian learning institution. Anti-gun activists hijacked a press conference on the incident earlier today. The Biden White House will probably push the usual talking points about banning so-called assault weapons, which will be echoed by their allies on the gun control issue. Unlike the shootings at Michigan State University and East High School in Denver, Colorado, this perpetrator had a handgun and two AR-15-style rifles. You can already hear the anti-gun Left licking their lips—now they had a chance to score some points. Except they can’t, Audrey Hale was identified as the shooter, and this person was transgender. Hale was shot and killed by police during the assault. 

As Julio wrote, there is a manifesto and maps of potential targets. This shooter planned this attack, and given the setting; a hate crime cannot be ruled out. The lingering question will remain unresolved since a transgender mass shooter is one story the media will avoid like the plague. Authorities said they have a working theory on a motive but are unwilling to disclose it at this time (via NBC News): 

The shooter, Audrey Hale, 28, of Nashville, identified as transgender and had no previous criminal record, according to the chief. 

Poll: Half of U.S. Population Believes National Media ‘Intend to Mislead, Misinform’ By Ben Bartee

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/03/19/poll-half-of-u-s-population-believes-national-media-intend-to-mislead-misinform-n1679694

Gallup conducted a survey of Americans on their level of confidence in the benevolence and trustworthiness of American media.

The big takeaways from the study are that 23% of respondents “believe most national news organizations care about the best interests of their readers, viewers, and listeners.” A full 50% “feel most national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public.”

Frankly, it’s amazing that, at this late date, given the endless parade of brazen lies on Russia’s non-existent meddling in the 2016 and 2020 elections, the debunked “safe and effective” mantra vis-à-vis COVID-19 shots, and a thousand other examples of duplicity — that apparently 50% of the country still puts any stock into the corporate media.

(Unfortunately, this study did not delineate between corporate media and independent media, which is a shame. I suspect the trust differential would be enormous.)

Another Pulitzer Prize discredited as propaganda By Monica Showalter

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

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America’s South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists?

Here’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that “immoral” war against a communist takeover:

There’s no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It’s crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder to look at.

It ran on the front page of the New York Times, cropped from the original to fill the space and make its impact even more immediate.

And it got the results the anti-war left wanted: public sentiment abruptly turned against the war as a result of this photo.  The Vietnamese people were abandoned by the Americans, whose cut-and-run evacuation from the Saigon embassy rooftop was only recently bested by Joe Biden’s Afghanistan pullout.  After that, the re-education camps rolled in, the boat people launched into the high seas, and the killing fields of Cambodia began.

Jane Fonda must have been so proud of herself.

New York Times Frustrated That Ron DeSantis Isn’t Dumb Enough To Be One Of Their Staff Writers By: Eddie Scarry

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/27/new-york-times-frustrated-that-ron-desantis-isnt-dumb-enough-to-be-one-of-their-staff-writers/

I’m sure it’s frustrating. Maybe the Times staff should stick to what they know.

A couple of recent articles in The New York Times show just how annoyed the national media is getting at so far being unable to find something wrong with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Why hasn’t he called Donald Trump a fathead on Twitter yet?! Where are all the women who want to accuse him of being a rapist?! Why won’t he back down from positions that are popular with voters?!

Admittedly, it’s never too late for any one of those scenarios to become a reality, and Republicans rarely justify high hopes. But for now, the Times has had to settle on attacking DeSantis for not being more readily attackable.

To that end, Times book reviewer Jennifer Szalai’s take on DeSantis’ newly published book is that it’s a mega letdown, “free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor.” Whereas a previous book DeSantis wrote was “weird and esoteric,” Szalai was disappointed in the new one that “reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”

Translation: Why wasn’t there anything for me to call racist?! Why Didn’t Ron include something that’s readily mocked as “election denialism”?!

I have no doubt the book is a bore. Politician books always are. (Especially Trump’s, which is why you’ve never seen a single line from it quoted anywhere.) But if that’s the No. 1 problem with a likely presidential candidate who has engaged — and won! — some highly consequential political battles, it seems to be slightly beside the point.

Get Tomorrow’s Disinformation Today!

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/28/get-tomorrows-disinformation-today/

This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.

In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.

All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, 4Chan racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.

Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.

It wasn’t long ago that such a claim opened you up to ridicule or worse.

A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.”  CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”

Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.

Media Demands Darkness, Not Sunlight, on January 6 Tapes What we are hearing from the media industrial complex is fear, not concern. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/23/media-demands-darkness-not-sunlight-on-january-6-tapes/

Ever since Axios reported that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave Fox News host Tucker Carlson unfettered access to surveillance video captured by Capitol security cameras on January 6, 2021, the corporate media has experienced a collective convulsion bordering on a nervous breakdown.

Guardians of the fourth estate long ago abandoned their self-proclaimed role as watchdog over those in power in exchange for the role of lapdog. But apparently the last ones to get the joke are reporters, editors, and cable news hosts themselves, who still operate under the delusion they maintain a vaunted place in the pecking order of American society rather than rank in popularity just below the toxic sludge smoldering in East Palestine, Ohio.

Not long ago—or maybe it has been a long time?—journalists would salivate at the chance to report on the contents of a massive trove of footage related to what the government calls a terror attack, especially if the same government pulled every trick in the book to keep it under wraps. Compelled by slavish idolatry of the state and contempt for the common man, the media, for lack of a better term, is acting as if the release of unseen video recorded on January 6 is a crime in progress.

This comes, mind you, after two full years of uncritically repeating every talking point about the so-called “insurrection” which involves calling it an “insurrection” even though no one has been charged with “insurrection.” No cop cried too unconvincingly, no lawmaker made too outlandish a claim, no occupant of the White House told one too many lies to jolt the slumbering curiosity, or even innate sense of skepticism, of corporate media apparatchiks.

“Breaking news” bulletins sought to grab the attention of their shrinking audience before airing a cherry-picked clip gleaned from the very collection of tapes now considered sacrosanct. 

Don Lemon gets away with a slap on the wrist CNN should have taken this golden opportunity to shed one of its most embarrassing acts Roger Kimball

https://thespectator.com/topic/don-lemon-gets-away-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist/?utm_source=

Have you noticed that bullies tend to grovel when threatened? They are cruel when they have the upper hand, but cringe, cower, and whimper whenever confronted with superior force.

A case in point is the smarmy CNN dittohead Don Lemón. Last week, while commenting about flash-in-the-pan presidential candidate Nikki Haley, he suggested that women over forty were no longer in their “prime.”

One might ask how Lemón, who takes every opportunity to advertise his homosexuality (also his race), would know.  But let’s leave that epistemic puzzle to one side. “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry,” Lemón declared. “A woman is considered to be in their [er, that’s “her,” Don, “her”] prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s. If you Google ‘when is a woman in her prime,’ it’ll say 20s, 30s and 40s.”

Well, the world’s biggest surveillance network said it, so it must be true.

That Didn’t Age Well! Read The Most Clownish Takes About The Laptop Hunter Biden Admits Was His By: Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/03/that-didnt-age-well-read-the-most-clownish-takes-about-the-laptop-hunter-biden-admits-was-his/

Hunter Biden admitted, in a roundabout way through his lawyers, that the infamous laptop featuring a trove of explicit content that surfaced in 2020 was his. On Wednesday, his attorneys demanded that Biden allies in the Justice Department launch investigations of the people who found the computer.

Biden’s lawyers sent two 14-page letters to the Delaware attorney general and the Department of Justice this week calling on officials to probe whether the people who gave the laptop — which was abandoned property at a Delaware computer repair shop owned and operated by John Paul Mac Isaac — to the New York Post violated state or federal laws.

“There is considerable reason to believe” that the individuals involved “in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data” may have committed crimes, the attorneys wrote. “Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to copying that data without Mr. Biden’s consent, and Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to distributing copies of that data from his place in Delaware.”

In other words, the laptop is undoubtedly Hunter Biden’s despite the remarkable spin from Democrats, the president, and the media who were desperate to dismiss the computer as Russian disinformation. Below are some of the statements that aged the worst.

Newsrooms Are Now Officially Democrats’ Newsletter Operations

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/02/newsrooms-are-now-officially-democrats-newsletter-operations/

The media’s leftward bias has been obvious for decades even as “journalists” denied their alignment with the Democratic Party. No honest person took Chris Cillizza’s 2016 claim that “reporters don’t root for a side. Period” to be true. All we’ve ever asked for is an admission from the media that it worked for the Democrats. We’re a little closer to that today.

Tuesday’s headline in the Daily Caller brought the light: “Major News Outlets Say They’re Ditching Objectivity In The Name Of ‘Diversity.’” The story beneath the headline tells us that, after interviewing more than 75 ​​”media leaders to gauge how the industry views the concept of ‘objectivity,’” a couple of big names in the press offered some guidelines for their colleagues.

The pair argued, said the Daily Caller, “that journalists should include their own beliefs, biases, and experiences to convey truth, and that journalistic objectivity was either unrealistic or undesirable.”

The two men who made the recommendation? Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

Not a year ago, the nabobs of the mainstream media tacitly admitted that their coverage is slanted when Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, announced it was “scaling back its opinion pages in an effort to combat a perception of” playing favorites and following a political agenda. The company claimed it had decided “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.”

The Morning Briefing: Liberal Media Bias Is Alive and More Embarrassing Than Ever By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/01/20/the-morning-briefing-liberal-media-bias-is-alive-and-more-embarrassing-than-ever-n1663415

I began writing about politics almost 22 years ago. My main focus when I started was liberal bias in the mainstream media. I didn’t intend for it to be my sole focus but, these two-plus decades later, it’s what I’ve written about the most. It’s kind of my thing. It would be nice if it didn’t have to be, but those people are awful, and I still like calling them out.

The way that the main players (The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.) go about their bias has changed over the years. It’s always been prevalent, but it used to be more subtle. I would have fun figuring out new patterns and tricks, especially in the Times.

That all changed when His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack H. Obama became president of the United States.

The semi-secret relationship between the MSM and liberal bias came out into the open. The smitten kids in the White House press corps would positively gush whenever The Lightbringer would interact with them. They began dotting their i’s with hearts when jotting down notes about him. It was one nauseating public display of affection after another for eight years.

Since then, nobody in the MSM has bothered to hide the bias, despite the fact that they keep insisting that it doesn’t exist.

It’s really gotten weird with President LOLEightyonemillion in office. They have to prop up the mindless loon in the Oval Office, which must be exhausting. The more Biden obviously deteriorates, the more the flying monkeys in the mainstream media go out of their way to make it seem like he’s not.