RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/john-hinderaker-and-joe-concha-speak-restoration-frontpagemagcom/

EXCERPT: Lawyer and co-Founder of the  Power Line blog John Hinderaker discusses  the evolution of media bias, fake news;

Transcript:

John Hinderaker: What I want to talk about in my presentation here is the evolution of the issue of media bias over the last 15 or 20 years.  And I want to do that primarily by comparing and contrasting two significant milestones in that story of media bias, which I think sheds a lot of light on how things have changed since the early 2000s.

So we started the website Power Line in 2002.  And media bias was one of the topics that we wrote on all the time.  And in those days, reporters for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were relatively accessible.  Their email addresses were public.  And if we emailed them, as we did rather frequently, to comment on and to critique their news stories, they usually would respond.  And so we got into some very interesting colloquies with some of those reporters, which resulted in a number of corrections being made to news stories.  Now, those corrections were generally subsilentio, unacknowledged, certainly, as to the source.  But nevertheless, that would sometimes happen.  Reporters in those days wanted at least to be seen as objective and fair, even though most were, in fact, biased in the direction of the Left.

Then in 2004, an episode that became known as Rathergate occurred.  “60 Minutes” tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents that put the service of President George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, way back in the early 1970s, in a bad light.  It was a complete fraud.  The documents were fakes.  And the fraud unraveled quickly, as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy forgeries that were full of substantive errors as well as the typographical errors that made most of the news.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/09/are-media-now-taking-orders-straight-from-the-white-house/

If you needed further proof that the big media are deeply biased toward the political left, look no further than the recent secret meetings held by the White House with some of its favorite news outlets. Why? To get them to spin bad economic news. And, given the generally low ethics and political bias of their profession, they’ll no doubt willingly do so.

Three top Biden officials appear to be spearheading the effort. Angry at what they see as unfair coverage of Biden’s supposed economic successes, they have decided to hold sub rosa sessions and phone calls as part of an “outreach” to the national media.

The media are of course willing to be used. After all, President Joe Biden’s administration is the furthest left in our nation’s history in the scope and content of its policies.

From the open border that has brought in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to naming out-and-proud Marxist nominees to key administration posts, from COVID lockdowns that have divided our nation but not stopped the Wuhan bug, to non-stop “stimulus” spending that has set off the worst inflation in decades, Biden literally has nothing to brag about, as we noted earlier this week.

President Jimmy Carter can now rest easy. He’s no longer the worst president of the postwar era. Biden is.

The White House decision to reach out to the media apparently came after a Dec. 3 rant by leftist Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who claims the media are treating Biden worse than they treated President Donald Trump — a laughable idea on its very face, given Biden’s spectacular failures on issue after issue, and the nonstop vitriol and scorn directed at Trump during his four years in office.

The three officials — National Economic Council Deputy Directors David Kamin and Bharat Ramamurti and port czar John Porcari — felt the bang-up job they were doing wasn’t getting through to the public.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-stonewalls-steele-dossier-disinformation-trump-nyt-washington-post-trump-11638718026?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘Why don’t they just fess up and say they’re sorry?” That is the question journalists have asked about the corporate and institutional clients of my crisis-management business. It’s a question media companies should be asking themselves amid the implosion of the Steele dossier. Here we are, a few weeks after the dossier was discredited, and no one has paid a price.

Having had media companies as clients, I’ve found that when they’re under fire, they behave no differently from chemical or drug companies. Why? Because they don’t see coming clean as being in their self-interest.

Among other things, the truth can tarnish the brand and jam them up in court. So they often deny, stonewall, close ranks, and attack their critics. Two things media companies have that other businesses don’t is the ability to deliver news instantly and the mantle of moral authority.

The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the sources of disinformation leveled at our clients. The first factor in a successful disinformation campaign is an audience that desperately wants to believe something. Then you find a plausible allegation that fits the marketplace. Next, you implant an outrageous allegation within the plausible one. Finally, you find a trustworthy person, someone simpatico with media organizations, to let it rip.

tps://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/28/reporters_question_yourselves_146782.html

If you have any doubt about whether the White House press corps has a different standard for President Joe Biden than for former President Donald Trump, consider the press briefings that followed their first physicals as president at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Biden’s physical occurred Friday.

On reflection, Team Trump was too transparent when then Press Secretary Sarah Sanders brought Ronny Jackson, then physician to the president, to the briefing room podium where he answered press questions for nearly an hour in January 2018.

Here’s a sampling of some of the more egregious press questions.

— “Are you confident of his prostate health?”

— “There have been reports that the president has forgotten names, that he is repeating himself. Are you ruling out things like early-onset Alzheimer’s? Are you looking at dementialike  symptoms?”

(Jackson disclosed that Trump had been given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test and scored 30 out of 30.)

— “Do you have a life expectancy range for him based on his results?”

— “Did you see any evidence of bone spurs?” — a reference to the cause for Trump’s fifth Vietnam-era draft deferment. (Jackson said the medical team didn’t check for bone spurs.)

— “Did you take a waist measurement for the president?”

— Given Trump’s age, then 71, “Will you give cognitive testing in the future?”

— “Does he take any sleep aids?” (Yes, Ambien occasionally during foreign trips.)

— “How much sleep does he get on average?”

CNN sent Dr. Sanjay Gupta to the briefing. Gupta challenged Jackson for asserting that Trump’s health was “excellent” for his age, given that Trump was taking cholesterol-lowering medication and Gupta saw evidence of heart disease and borderline obesity. (Jackson credited Trump’s health to “great genes.”)

— “Does he watch too much TV?”

— “Do you have any concerns about the president’s use of Twitter?”

— “Is there anyone on the president’s medical team, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist, whose job it is to monitor the president’s emotional state or watch for potential psychiatric problems or indicators of those?” (“That falls upon me,” Jackson responded.)

Not all of the above questions are out of bounds, but the very number of questions about Trump’s mental state was over-the-top. If then Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ plan had been to make the press look like a pack of jackals to the GOP base, she succeeded.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/24/ii-awards-its-first-fool-itzer-prize-to-msnbc-for-its-thanksgiving-coverage/

In our continued effort to point out the ugly media bias that misleads and divides us, we have created a prize that will be occasionally handed out to outlets and journalists that promote the Democrats’ agenda, violate decent sensibilities, tell outright lies, or demonstrate an obvious hatred of America. Our first Foolitzer goes to MSNBC for a rant of the sort that has become all too common this time of the year.

During Saturday’s “The Cross Connection,” host Tiffany Cross turned the screen and the microphone over to a “Cross Connection favorite,” who launched into a tirade about settlers who brought nothing but took everything.

In what appears to be a pre-taped “essay” for the show, Gyasi Ross, identified as an American Indian, lectured viewers on “the mythology of Thanksgiving,” which he believes “closely mimics the mythology of white America.” The idea of “equal exchange” between Native Americans and settlers on what some say is the first Thanksgiving is how America “wants to see itself.”

“I’m still trying to find out what indigenous people received of value” from the first Thanksgiving, he said. “Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence.”

Of course, he conveniently ignores the genocide and violence among the tribes before Europeans arrived on the continent, the same genocide and violence that has afflicted humans throughout their history. He also forgets to mention that the first Thanksgiving happened more than 150 years before there was an America, and there’s no acknowledgement that some Cherokees owned black slaves.

But never mind. He’s on a roll.

“That genocide and violence is still on the menu, as state-sponsored violence against native and black Americans is commonplace, and violent, private white supremacy is celebrated and subsidized,” Ross continued, seamlessly moving on to a wild claim that “from Ahmaud Arbery to Trayvon Martin, white Americans are still killing native and black Americans with no fear of reprisal.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/my-permanent-suspension-twitter-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: Below is Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov’s explanation of his recent permanent suspension from Twitter:

On Thursday morning, Nov. 18, 2021, at 2:39am Pacific, Twitter informed me that my Twitter account had been permanently suspended. The reason they gave me was that I had violated Twitter’s “COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy.”

The offending article they cited that I had posted was Pfizer Confirms COVID-Vaccinated People Can ‘Shed’ Spike Proteins And Harm The Unvaccinated – from vaccinesafety.info. The article is factual and backed up by verified and credible sources. Twitter gave me zero information on what exactly is misleading in the article.

This permanent suspension is a culmination of a long history of Twitter punishing me for violating their leftist One-Party line. Just recently, for instance, on Oct. 25, 2021, Twitter informed me that they had locked me out of my account because I had violated their “rules against hateful conduct.”

My “hateful conduct” involved me entering the discussion over Twitter suspending Rep. Jim Banks’ Twitter account because he had called Dr. Rachel Levine, the transgender Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary, a “man.”

I tweeted the story with an honest question that was on my mind: Does it matter if Rachel has a penis or not? I honestly thought — and continue to think — that this is a legitimate question in the context of Rep. Banks’ punishment.

I was subsequently informed that I had to delete the Tweet in order to get my account back. I decided to delete it – so that I could return and continue to ask many similar questions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/17/looks-like-joe-biden-just-lost-the-new-york-times/

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

And even more remarkable is what comes next. Irwin writes:

You can draw a direct line from a specific policy decision that Biden and congressional Democrats made this past winter to some of the inflation happening now.

In designing the stimulus that Congress passed in March, Biden’s administration went big, with $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief — on top of a separate $900 billion package that passed three months earlier. Put the two together, and $2.8 trillion in federal money has been coursing through the economy this year while economic activity has trended only a few hundred billion dollars a year short of what mainstream analysts would consider full health.

The fact that the Times, along with others in the mainstream media, admits that inflation is a problem is in itself a noteworthy development, since for months it insisted that it was just a data anomaly – one that Republicans were trying to exploit for political gain.

Now, with prices for many common household goods having gone up by double digits over the past few months and no end in sight for the trend, the inflation story is impossible to ignore. 

But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

In April, for example, a USA Today “fact check” told readers that COVID-19 was “to blame for spike in lumber prices, not Biden.” In June, it ran another saying that “Rising gas prices due to high demand and low supply, not Biden’s policies.”

The next month, AP declared that “House GOP falsely blames Biden for gas prices.”