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The Abu Akleh report is CNN’s latest anti-Israel hit job Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-707833

CNN has a history of anti-Israel bias, but the left-wing Cable News Network outdid itself this week. In its coverage on Wednesday of the May 11 killing of 51-year-old Palestinian-American Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli raid on terrorists in Jenin, the outlet concluded that it had been a targeted shooting.

It did this by providing a dramatic headline about “new evidence suggest[ing]” that this was the case. The body of the story included a bit more context, but not enough to camouflage the slant of the six reporters in the byline. 

The description in the feature-like article of the “shaky video, filmed by Al Jazeera cameraman Majdi Banura, [which] captures the scene when Abu Akleh… was killed by a bullet to the head” glossed over the part about “the footage not showing [her] being shot,” and slid effortlessly into eyewitness accounts. 

Will the Lies and Smears Ever Stop? By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/23/the-left-will-never-stop-smearing-us-n1599368

Without fail, when there’s a mass shooting, the mainstream media will collude with the Democratic Party to blame conservatives.

In 2019, a deranged man named Brenton Tarrant shot and killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was a self-proclaimed socialist and an environmentalist who hated capitalists and trade. One motive for his attack was to bring more gun control to the country. He called himself an “eco-fascist by nature” and declared that “the nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.”

The media called him a “far-right extremist.”

Months later, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people at Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Crusius proclaimed to have the same views as Tarrant and wrote in his manifesto that “Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades.”

The media called him a “far-right extremist.”

Last Saturday, a deranged teenager shot up a Buffalo supermarket, killing ten people. According to his manifesto, he is a former communist who now says he falls in the “mild-moderate authoritarian left category,” and added that, “you can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

The Liberals Who Saw Through Russiagate Not all of us were in the bag, writes the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harpers-mag-russiagate-steele-dossier-holman-jenkins-cockburn-clinton-trump-putin-11652827839?mod=opinion_major_pos18

Holman Jenkins, Jr. has for the past several years done an admirable but thankless job exposing the Russiagate fraud by focusing on the sleazy and now thoroughly discredited Steele dossier, which posited a conspiracy between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government. But when he writes about the cowardice of the “90% of the media and 100% of the foreign-policy class in Washington” that encouraged Russiagate to bloom and poison our politics (“What Did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America?” Business World, May 14), he should take a moment to credit the 10% that didn’t go along for the ride, even before the Steele dossier was published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed and its feckless editor, Ben Smith.

Andrew Cockburn’s cover story in the December 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine blew the whistle loud and clear on the Clintons’ drive to blame Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Vladimir Putin instead of on Hillary and Bill Clinton themselves. So shocked were the Clintons and the establishment media by Mr. Trump’s dreadful triumph that they faulted a nasty foreigner from central casting, and some alleged hacker henchmen, rather than examining the corrupt personal conduct or the anti-working-class politics of America’s first couple of neoliberal con artistry. Not all liberals were in the bag, Mr. Jenkins.

John R. MacArthur

President and publisher Harper’s Magazine

New York

Gutless Media in New Haven By Jack Fowler

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/gutless-media-in-new-haven/

If you want to know what is happening in the Connecticut city that’s home to Yale University and its activist and intimidating law school, here’s some advice: Cross the Atlantic and read England’s Daily Mail, because the Nutmeg State local media — namely, the New Haven Register and the ABC affiliate, WTNH — refuse to cover the madness happening under their noses.

The madness is this, per the Daily Mail: Brats at the Yale Law School, the same ones who last March disrupted a free-speech panel featuring conservative lawyer Kristen Waggoner (a story you would not have read about at the Register or seen on WTNH — it was left to the New York Post and other non-New Haven outlets to cover the outrage), have now embarked on plotting “unrelenting daily confrontation” directed at conservative classmates, particularly those belonging to the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. Torqued by the release of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that might kybosh Roe v. Wade, the jurisprudential darlings took to social media to demand targeting outrage and harm at real people:

In [Instagram posts], a number of liberal law students took aim at their conservative peers — in particular, members of the law school’s Federalist Society.

‘The members of YLS [Federalist Society] are conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about,’ first-year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram posting.

‘So why are they still coming to our parties/laughing in the library/roaming these weirdly high school-esque halls with precious few social consequences and without unrelenting daily confrontation?’

Another first-year law student, Leah Fessler, who is planning on interning for federal Judge Lewis Liman this summer, wrote: ‘Democratic Institutions won’t save us. If you’re not ready to hold accountable the people and groups who at this very school produced the men who just took away women’s bodily autonomy, miss me with the commentary.’

Ali Velshi’s Delusions MSNBC anchor illustrates the extent of the Left’s detachment from reality.Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/ali-velshis-delusions-robert-spencer/

Ali Velshi is an anchor and correspondent for MSNBC, but he is much more than that as well. He is a made guy, an accepted member of one of today’s most powerful Mafia groups, the nation’s Leftist political elite class: Velshi is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York, and a member of the Board of Directors of Seeds of Peace, an organization dedicated to combating an entire laundry list of sins the Left regularly claims to find among its opponents: “Racism, Sexism, Classism, Political Violence, Colonialism, Military Occupation, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia.” As such, Ali Velshi is a typical and indeed exemplary Leftist; not only does he hold the opinions that the Leftist establishment wants you to accept, but he is one of the principal missionaries charged with imparting these views to the masses. And he is just as deluded, hateful, and out of touch with reality as you’d expect.

As a practicing Muslim who has railed against “Islamophobia,” Velshi is also vociferously anti-Israel. On a May 2021 MSNBCbroadcast, Velshi ranted against the Jewish state, declaring that“idea that it’s even remotely controversial to call what Israel has imposed on Palestinians a form of apartheid is laughable.” In reality, of course, there is no substance whatsoever to this “apartheid” claim; it is an invention of the foes of Israel that is used to turn international public opinion against Israel, but it falls apart upon even the most superficial examination.

Apartheid was the system of racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa that lasted from 1948 into the 1990s. Black South Africans were excluded by law from operating businesses or living in certain areas, and public transportation and public services were segregated. Those who claim that Israel is an apartheid state note that Palestinians live in areas that are separate from the State of Israel, into which they can only pass for work through checkpoints where the wait is sometimes considerable.

Golden Showers in the Media By Arjun Singh

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/golden-showers-in-the-media/

Did you read the title? Did it strike you as oblique and lurid, reminiscent of the Steele dossier’s salacious allegations? “Good,” Joseph Pulitzer would say. The 19th-century businessman and Democratic Party mover-and-shaker was a pioneer of such news copy. His marquee newspaper, The New York World, was sensational, scandalous, salubrious, and graphically outrageous – filled with colorful exaggerations designed to stimulate an opera of emotion: “yellow journalism.” There’s an oft-repeated line in the media that “sex sells.” Pulitzer and his opposite number, William Randolph Hearst, invented the idea long ago. In doing so, their pages reached circulation exceeding a million people, in the 1890s at that. Yellow journalism begat a gilded lifestyle for Pulitzer, who became fabulously rich.

Now, 111 years since his death, Pulitzer’s legacy of yellow journalism lives on in the ‘Pulitzer Prizes,’ whose 2022 honorees were announced on Monday. With award-winning irony, the endowment of Pulitzer’s wealth – built atop decades of gutter-press reporting – is now used to honor what many call the most prestigious award in journalism, for reportage supposedly of the highest quality. If Pulitzer were alive today, his work would never win the prize now in his name. Nobody would ever dream of it. It’d be like giving the National Enquirer – a celebrity gossip tabloid that funneled Donald Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels – the Nobel Prize in Literature. As one British journalist wrote of Pulitzer, he “strove for primacy of the sewer.”

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.