RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/592969-cnns-collapse-is-now-complete

It all began 42 years ago — Ted Turner’s creation of a 24/7 news network that would exist on something called cable TV. Few believed it could succeed. 

And, for its first decade, CNN largely chugged along but wasn’t seen as a game-changer or ​a true competitor to big broadcast news entities based in New York in the form of CBS, NBC and ABC. That all changed when war broke out between the United States and Iraq in 1991.  

On the night war exploded over Baghdad, CNN was the only news organization that was able to broadcast from the city under siege as the U.S. onslaught began, all courtesy of the CNN team’s ability to convince the Iraqi government to grant them a line out of the city to broadcast​, one that the competition could not secure.

“How CNN Won the War” was the glowing headline from The Washington Post on a story that perfectly chronicled the events that led to CNN officially becoming a major player. And off it went. 

Until 2002, CNN was ​No. 1 in the cable news race. But competition that hadn’t existed before ended its dominance forever, primarily in the form of Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC. Despite the ratings results, CNN continued to carry itself as a credible, facts-first network of integrity that leaned heavily on solid reporting with a sprinkling of opinion and infotainment mixed in via programs such as “Larry King Live” and “Crossfire.”  

In 2013, the network hired former NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker to take the reins as ratings continued to be below average at best. This gave Zucker a mandate to radically change the network from its journalistic roots of more than three decades — the months-long wall-to-wall coverage of a missing Malaysian airliner being an early example.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/media-attack-investigative-reporter-for-investigating-and-reporting-on-cair/

Hamas-linked CAIR gets a free pass from lazy media that smear Steven Emerson as an ‘Islamophobe.’

W hen accusations first emerged that Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) had an informant inside the Ohio office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), it was clear that the media had missed the story entirely. Instead of bemoaning “spying” by a “mole” inside the most high-profile Islamist group in the nation, the headlines should have read “Moderate Muslim Infiltrates Islamist Organization.”

The story was pretty straightforward. A Muslim named Romin Iqbal had given information about his employer to a think-tank founder and investigative journalist. But when Iqbal’s cover was blown, and he did what he had to do to avoid being exiled by his “community” (or worse), the Ohio media acted as though they had discovered and exposed a scandalous and potentially illegal espionage scheme, and then the national media followed blindly in their footsteps.

Rather than shunning and slandering Emerson for investigating CAIR (which in 2008 was characterized, in the Dallas Morning News, as having been a front for Hamas in 1993 and whose founding members included former members of the Islamic Association for Palestine, which funneled money to Hamas before disbanding in 2004), the Ohio press should be celebrating him. Rather than distorting Emerson’s record and accusing him of being an “Islamophobe” running a hate group, the lazy writers in Ohio and elsewhere should emulate him and do some research of their own.

Like newsreaders regurgitating the words that appear on a teleprompter, Ohio reporters mostly repeated what CAIR told them, sometimes going a half step beyond to quote the Clinton-Podesta outfit known as the Center for American Progress. Not a single Ohio reporter that I found seemed to have taken time even to look at Wikipedia to learn about “allegations of Islamist ties.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/big-tech-thugs-and-their-allies-larry-elder/

In an article last February headlined “Do Facebook, Twitter and YouTube censor conservatives? Claims ‘not supported by the facts,’ new research says,” USA Today’s Jessica Guynn wrote, “Despite repeated charges of anti-conservative bias from former President Donald Trump and other GOP critics, Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube are not slanted against right-leaning users, a new report out of New York University found.”

Guynn quoted Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, who said: “Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they’re treated on social media. They complain they’re censored and suppressed but, not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction.”

In other words, conservative users of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram marinate in a state of paranoia, groundlessly convinced that their posts face restrictions, if not outright suppression.

Tell this to singer-songwriter John Ondrasik, to cite just one example, who on Jan. 2 posted his new music video critical of President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. YouTube first attached a warning that the video’s images violated the platform’s “graphic content policy,” making it unsuitable for younger audiences. But five days and 250,000 views later, YouTube removed it altogether. Nine hours later, when conservatives and, one hopes, others complained, YouTube restored it, although it added another warning labeling the video “inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/media-doesnt-stop-lying-it-doubles-down-its-lies-daniel-greenfield/

NPR claimed that Sotomayor was forced to work remotely because Gorsuch wouldn’t wear a mask despite Chief Justice Roberts asking everyone to wear masks. In an extraordinary move, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Sotomayor have all denied the story.

This hasn’t even slowed down NPR which is in a conflict over how hard to sneer its way past it.

This Daily Beast headline ought to clarify the execrable arrogance in play here, “NPR ‘Founding Mother’ Unloads on Public Editor Over SCOTUS Story: ‘She’s Not Clarifying Anything!'”

Fake, but accurate. In an accurate, but fake sidebar, the media managed to turn an innocuous Mitch McConnell quote into a racial slur.

Mitch McConnell says Black people vote just as much as ‘Americans’ – Courier Journal

Mitch McConnell Suggests Black Americans Aren’t Really ‘Americans’ McConnell didn’t misspeak—at best, he uttered a white nationalist Freudian slip. – News One

The rest of the garbage parade quickly arrived.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/18/bidens-fcc-commissioner-nominee-gigi-sohn-wants-to-nuke-right-leaning-broadcasters-from-air/

President Joe Biden’s nominee for commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission hates Fox News and wants the federal agency to regulate conservative broadcasts because she disagrees with them.

The White House first announced Gigi Sohn as Biden’s FCC nominee in October.

“Gigi is one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks,” the Biden administration claimed. “For over thirty years, Gigi has worked to defend and preserve the fundamental competition and innovation policies that have made broadband Internet access more ubiquitous, competitive, affordable, open, and protective of user privacy.”

Sohn’s inclination towards censorship and partisan regulation, however, torpedoed her chances of confirmation. Biden re-nominated Sohn at the beginning of the year but her chances of gaining Republican support are once again slim considering her history of criticizing and painting TV networks she disagrees with as threats to our democracy that need to be punished.

In one 2019 tweet, Sohn hinted that Fox News should be scrutinized because they “have played their own role in destroying democracy.”

“I agree that scrutiny of big tech is essential, as is scrutiny of big telecom, cable & media. And trust me, the latter have played their own role in destroying democracy & electing autocrats. Like, say, Fox News?” she tweeted.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/muslim-takes-hostages-texas-synagogue-robert-spencer/

On Saturday, Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas was in the middle of Shabbat services that were being livestreamed on Facebook when a Muslim gunman named Malik Faisal Akram, burst in and took hostages, including the rabbi. After a standoff that lasted hours, all the hostages were safely freed and Akram was killed. Then the denial and obfuscation began almost immediately.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno got the ball rolling when he said: “We do believe from our engagement with this subject that he was singularly focused on one issue, uh, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community, uh, but we’re continuing to work to find motive and, and we will continue on that path.”

DeSarno’s bizarre statement was based on the fact that the demands the hostage-taker made all revolved around Aafia Siddiqui, also known as “Lady al-Qaeda,” who is serving 86 years in prison for plotting a large-scale jihad massacre in New York City. The hostage-taker reportedly demanded that his “sister” be freed, which led to widespread speculation that he was in fact Aafia Siddiqui’s brother. However, Akram was no relation to Siddiqui; he was referring to her as his sister in Islam.

According to Tom Winter of NBC News, the hostage-taker even had the rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, Charlie Cytron-Walker, whom he was holding hostage, call another rabbi in New York City. “The purpose of the call was to again demand the release of Aafia Siddiqui. The New York City based rabbi called 9-1-1 and the NYPD is well aware of the incident.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/media-president-joe-biden-honest-appraisal-polling/

Joe Biden usually likes being compared to Donald Trump. During the 2020 presidential campaign the media often contrasted the two figures in order to highlight how much more decent and compassionate and normal Biden is, as opposed to Orange Man. However, the empathizer-in-chief might not be as crazy about the latest parallels emerging thanks to his poll numbers.

A headline in Newsweek, not exactly a right-wing rag, reads, “Joe Biden’s Approval Lower Than Donald Trump’s at Same Stage of Presidency: Poll.” The president’s current approval rating according to the Quinnipiac poll is a dismal 33 percent. Considering how slanted these polls can be, the real number might be even worse.

Imagine how dreadful Biden’s approval rating would be if the mainstream media were even remotely honest about his administration’s myriad of failures. But will journalists eventually tire of trying to polish a t-…a terrible president? Spinning Biden’s barrage of bad news grows harder by the day.

This week Joe couldn’t even get Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams to show up for his tirade on voting rights in Atlanta. His rant, which Al Sharpton described as a “you’re going to Hell” speech, failed to strike the right tone with…well, anyone.