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MEDIA

The Anti-Israel Past of NYT Jerusalem Bureau’s Latest Hire Alana Goodman

https://freebeacon.com/media/the-anti-israel-past-of-nyt-jerusalem-bureaus-latest-hire/

The latest hire in the New York Times‘s Jerusalem Bureau doesn’t exactly have a history of scrupulous objectivity when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hiba Yazbek, a former intern for Israeli-bashing Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), called herself a victim of Israel’s “mental occupation” and said Palestinians are a “minority in our own land” in a 2020 speech.

Yazbek, who joined the Times as a news assistant last week, deleted similar comments she had posted on Twitter, as well as posts in which she condemned Israel for killing terrorists, according to the media watchdog group Honest Reporting.

Although Yazbek deleted a number of her politically charged posts, she still has a photo of her sitting next to squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) as her Twitter background. Another photo posted on Twitter shows Yazbek posing with Tlaib. Yazbek interned in 2019 for Tlaib—one of the most vocal anti-Israel members of Congress who has accused the Jewish state of “apartheid.”

The hire is likely to fuel concerns about Times reporting on the Middle East conflict, which pro-Israel watchdog groups claim is deeply skewed against the Jewish state. In 2019, the Times was forced to apologize after publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that depicted then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog with a Star of David on his collar, leading a blind President Donald Trump who was drawn wearing a yarmulke.

The outlet also caught flak for publishing a glowing portrayal of Louis Farrakhan and a lengthy interview with Alice Walker that failed to mention their anti-Semitism in 2020. That same year, Times opinion editor Bari Weiss stepped down and said she had faced harassment from colleagues over her support for Israel.

MSNBC Host Frets About Musk Taking Over Twitter in Pathological Display of Liberal Projection Ari Melber’s embarrassing display was just a case of liberal projection on steroids. By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/26/msnbc-host-frets-about-musk-taking-over-twitter-in-pathological-display-of-liberal-projection/

A video of MSNBC host Ari Melber on Monday fretting that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk could use Twitter to “secretly ban” or “turn down the reach” of a major party’s candidate has gone viral, and for good reason. Never has there been a more glaring and pathological example of liberal projection on display—and many conservatives are reacting with stunned disbelief.

The “Rubin Report’s” Dave Rubin tweeted, “This is exactly what the Machine\Left\Democrats have done to their opponents for years, you absolute [clown]@AriMelber. Enjoy the ride into irrelevance . . .”

“He’s merely reciting what Twitter did to conservatives. But he doesn’t realize it or convinced himself it didn’t happen,” wrote radio host Jason Rantz.

Former diplomat Richard Grenell, who served as Donald Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, tweeted: “Breaking: @AriMelber was born yesterday. Happy Belated Birthday, Ari.”

During the Monday evening episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber,” the host perfectly described what Twitter had become before Musk’s takeover—a mechanism for narrative control benefitting one political party.

Melber argued that as the owner of Twitter, Musk does not have to explain himself: “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees!” he warned with wide-eyed horror. “Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it til after the election.”

The Media’s Russia-Collusion Mess Was No Error By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-medias-russia-collusion-mess-was-no-error/

Emails show that one journalist actually shared his raw copy with Fusion GPS.

Special Counsel John Durham, pursuing a case against Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI in a conspiracy to push the Russia “collusion” swindle, recently shared communications involving Fusion GPS and various reporters. Durham says he is in possession of “hundreds of emails in which Fusion GPS employees shared raw, unverified, and uncorroborated information — including their own draft research and work product — with reporters.”

One of these exchanges concerns a breathless piece from Slate in 2016, tying the Trump Organization’s email server to the Russian Alfa Bank. You may remember that the story dropped only a week before the 2016 presidential election. One of the first big Russia-hoax pieces, it would become the template for many others to come. In one email, Franklin Foer, then at Slate, passes on his raw copy to Fusion GPS, which was working for Hillary at the time, and asks the outfit to look it over for “omissions and errors.” Once the information was repackaged into a news story, Hillary sent out a release claiming that “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

We shouldn’t kid ourselves. This is how politicians launder oppo info. In movies, precocious reporters stake out office buildings, rummage through garbage, flip through piles of documents, and uncover dusty folders in the back of old cabinets. For the most part, that’s a fantasy. It’s about access. Most big scoops are handed to reporters — whose greatest skill is being lucky enough to have landed in powerful positions — by the political opposition. And, in my book, there’s nothing unethical about passing along info that’s true, no matter who the source is.

More Hilarious Wailing at Elon Musk Wait, you mean Twitter could ban one party’s political speech?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-hilarious-wailing-at-elon-musk-twitter-purchase-progressives-robert-reich-ari-melber-11651006771?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

My, what a progressive panic Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has inspired. MSNBC host Ari Melber warns that Mr. Musk could hack the political debate by having the website “secretly ban one party’s candidate” or “turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.”

Uh, hello? Twitter has banned President Trump. A month before the 2020 election, it moved to “turn down the reach” of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those actions weren’t secret, but Mr. Melber’s alarm echoes what conservatives have been saying for years about big tech’s censorship. As long as the usual Silicon Valley overlords controlled all of social media, progressives didn’t mind. But Elon Musk buys Twitter, and suddenly freer speech is a national crisis.

“Musk and his apologists say if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere,” tweeted former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “But where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach millions of people other than Twitter?” Yet conservative critics of Twitter have long been told to build their own sites. We’ll friend you later on ReichBook.

Elon Conquers The Twitterverse Our chattering class claims Musk is a supervillain. The truth is simpler: He wants free speech. They don’t. Mike Solana

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/elon-conquers-the-twitterverse?token

Three weeks ago, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Elon Musk, billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, had acquired over 9% of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder and setting in motion a chain of events that led, ultimately, to yesterday’s outright purchase of the now $44 billion company. In a press release, Elon shared his goals for the platform, which echoed the goals he’s shared all month: 

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

“Freedom,” “open source technology,” and “man, I really hate these spam bots.” The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic. They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism. 

Welcome to the Clown World. Boy, do we have ground to cover. 

The social internet is always a Dalí painting—surreal and horrifying and beautiful. A million crazy people screaming over nonsense, with funny jokes or anecdotes mixed in, fortune cookie observations, legitimate political happenings, and “words are violence” hall monitors from The Washington Post waging daily information war on trolls and Russian bots and okay actually just a lot of regular people with whom they disagree, or simply don’t like. 

But even by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books.

TOM GROSS: THE MEDIA’S TAKE ON ELON MUSK AND TWITTER

The takeover of Twitter yesterday by free speech advocate Elon Musk may herald a significant change in global political debate, and provide a major platform for views challenging “woke” opinion.

Predictably many in the liberal establishment – who has enjoyed a near monopoly on mainstream media opinion – are outraged.

The Washington Post – owned by the super-rich Jeff Bezos – was so alarmed that Twitter now may become more balanced that the paper called for Biden to move against Musk in order “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.”

Below are four articles on Musk’s buyout, from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and two from The New York Times.

As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth. Ditto for advertisers, who represent about 90% of the company’s revenue. Yet Silicon Valley’s tech lords have decided they want to be arbiters of speech on political topics like climate change and the origins of Covid.

Kyle Smith writes in The New York Post:

This whole thing apparently got started because Musk was willing to spend $44 billion to keep reading the Babylon Bee. It was five days after the right-leaning Bee got suspended from twitter for making a joke about the transgender (male-to-female) individual Rachel Levine, who is the assistant secretary for health and human services, that Musk sent his famous tweet asking, “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to” the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy?” In a followup post, he noted, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”

You could argue the Bee’s joke about Levine was nasty. So freaking what? The best comedy is nasty. Jokes are supposed to say the unsayable. If your idea of comedy is people saying the sayable, watch Stephen Colbert. Neither Colbert nor anyone else ever gets banned from anything for calling Republicans Nazis, by the way. Would you rather be called a Nazi, or . . . a man?

The Times Tries To Rescue Biden’s ‘American Rescue Plan’ — And Fails

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/22/the-times-tries-to-rescue-bidens-american-rescue-plan-and-fails/

When not trying desperately to damage Republicans by keeping the Jan. 6 riot on the front page, the New York Times bravely does public relations work for the Biden administration. The latest case in point is the pathetic attempt by the “paper of record” to defend the misguided, unjustified, inflation-fueling $2 trillion “American Rescue Plan.”

The article — “If Biden’s Plan Is Like a ‘New Deal,’ Why Don’t Voters Care?” — claims that Joe Biden’s big problem right now is that voters don’t know how much they’re benefiting from his March 2021 “rescue” plan.

But despite a valiant attempt to put lipstick on a pig, the report ends up making the case for how badly voters got hoodwinked.

The story focuses on the $350 billion the bill dumped on state and local governments and begins by telling the story of how Richmond, Va., plans to spend tens of millions in “rescue” funds to upgrade a community center and how excited the mayor is about this project.

“The city,” reporter Alexander Burns writes, “intends to build it in the next few years using $20 million from the American Rescue Plan.”

Wait. In the next few years?

CNN+: Grand Opening, Grand Closing By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnn-grand-opening-grand-closing/

Many conservatives will be dancing on the grave of CNN+, and there’s no getting around the fact that CNN just didn’t put out a sufficiently appealing slate of programming to get enough people to shell out $59.99 per year. But as Discovery’s announcement implied, there was never much reason to pay an additional fee just to get additional CNN programming, when regular CNN was available on basic cable, and it gave you more or less the same thing.

Discovery streaming head J. B. Perrette said that, “In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in service which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings, and, for the company, a more sustainable business model to drive our future investments in great journalism and storytelling.”

No, Chris Wallace is not popular enough, but it’s not clear that any news anchor or collection of hosts would get a sufficient number of people shelling out to make a streaming news network sustainable. (Fox Nation comes closest, in part because it has made a subscription to it feel like a tribal symbol — a statement about who you are and what you value. If someone tells you they subscribe to Fox Nation, you probably know how they feel about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and Colin Kaepernick.)

In the end, CNN+ didn’t offer anything sufficiently unique. As I noted earlier this month, this streaming service didn’t have a programming equivalent of The Mandalorian or Stranger Things or Bridgerton — something really popular that couldn’t be seen anywhere else. It is hard to imagine what CNN could offer that would be akin to that. Maybe the work of Clarissa Ward in Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past year is the most compelling, jaw-dropping, must-watch television journalism that CNN has done in a while. But I’m still not sure people would subscribe to a separate streaming service just to watch it.

News is unlikely to ever sustain a streaming service, by itself. But it is likely that some form of CNN will appear on any streaming service that emerges from the merger of HBO Max and Discovery+.

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Compares DeSantis, Youngkin Parental Choice Bills to ‘Russian War Tactics’By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-compares-desantis-youngkin-parental-choice-bills-to-russian-war-tactics/

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, reacting to the fury in Florida over the recently codified Parental Rights in Education bill prohibiting sexuality instruction for kindergartners through third graders, compared such legislation to “Russian war tactics” of “dehumanization.”

Referring to the Republican governors who’ve spearheaded these measures, namely Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis, Wallace lamented how effective their rhetoric and “politics of ‘parental choice’,” she said using scare quotes, have been at winning the ideological issue.

“The truth is dehumanization as a tactic for politics is from war. Russians get the soldiers to rape children by dehumanizing them,” she said.

Some conservatives have resorted to labeling those who oppose the Florida law, which empowers parents to decide when and how to teach their children about sexual orientation and gender identity, as “groomers,” an allegation of priming kids for pedophilia or sexual abuse. While the phrase has packed a lot of punch and sent many progressive proponents of sexualized K-12 curricula retreating, some conservatives argue that it’s counterproductive to the debate.

“It’s being deployed in our politics, and people like you and I sometimes lose the plot and admire its effectiveness, not its substance, but even the analysis of these tactics loses sight of what this speech brings us back to which is that dehumanization has a cost right now,” Wallace added.

“Kids will die,” she said, harkening back to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim from February that Florida’s new law, dubbed ‘Don’t Say Gay’ by progressives,” will drive up LGBT youth suicides.

The Regime Media’s Quandary: By Exposing Joe Biden They Exonerate Donald Trump By Steve McCann

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_regime_medias_quandary_by_exposing_joe_biden_they_exonerate_donald_trump.html

The regime media (the amalgamation of the legacy media, elitist opinion writers, and the internet troika: Google/Facebook/Twitter) finds itself in a quandary of its own making.  As the nation descends into recession and societal turmoil, the candidate for whom they prostituted themselves, Joe Biden, reveals on a daily basis that he is not mentally or physically capable of being President.  Further, it has become increasingly more difficult to continuously obfuscate not only the ongoing revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop but Joe’s life-long history of corruption and mendacity. 

By comparison, for four years, despite a lack of evidence coupled with numerous exculpatory investigations, this same cabal incessantly promoted the fictitious narrative that Donald Trump was a racist, a xenophobe, a demagogue, and the most corrupt person to ever serve as president of the United States. 

Accordingly, the regime media proclaimed that was in the nation’s vital interest to replace Trump with the “decent, honest, and honorable” Joe Biden.  As he has the “experience and character” to rescue the nation and restore “decency and honor” in the White House.

The quandary: how does the regime media avoid the exposure of Joe Biden’s lifelong corruption and failures without the public’s inevitable comparison of the two men, their families, and their accomplishments?   A comparison that would result in the effective exoneration and rehabilitation of Donald Trump, whom they relentlessly accused of being the most unscrupulous person on earth.  A cudgel they could no longer use if he decides to run for the presidency in 2024.