RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/16/please-stop-trusting-anything-the-mainstream-media-report/

America’s mainstream, or legacy, media have an agenda. It’s not to subjectively report the truth but to further leftist ideas and policies, all of which are toxic. The press’ disinformation campaign to prop up critical race theory is yet another example of its effort to deceive, manipulate, and divide on behalf of the party it is constantly shilling for.

A new study from the American Enterprise Institute found the media focus on schools teaching the history of slavery and racism, and largely ignore the “bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity.”

AEI’s Frederick M. Hess “examined all news accounts addressing CRT published over a one-year period by four major newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today),” and several “influential education press outlets.” All are news accounts. None are opinion pieces.

“Given that this admittedly revolutionary worldview is what motivates many objections to CRT-influenced pedagogy, one would expect news accounts to routinely address it,” Hess writes in “Media’s Misleading Portrayal of the Fight over Critical Race Theory.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/washington-post-corrects-removes-reporting-steele-dossier

The Washington Post did something many other liberal outlets have failed to do and corrected previous reporting that relied on the discredited Steele dossier that accused former President Donald Trump of an extensive conspiracy with the Russians.

“The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusan American businessman as a key source of the ‘Steele dossier,’ a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump,” Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote. 

“The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as ‘Source D,’ the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele,” Farhi continued. 

The post added editor’s notes, amended headlines, removed sections identifying Millian as the source and deleted an accompanying video summarizing the article. 

“Source D, according to the dossier, alleged that Russian intelligence had learned that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to defile a Moscow hotel room once occupied by President Obama and Michelle Obama and possessed a video recording of the incident,” Farhi wrote. “The allegation, which the dossier said was confirmed by a second person described only as ‘Source E,’ has never been substantiated.”

The Post’s correction came as other news outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, have been criticized for failing to adjust reporting after Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the Trump-Russia probe further discredited the already-shaky dossier. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10193997/Lawyer-representing-Project-Veritas-boss-James-OKeefe-suggests-feds-leaked-legal-memos.html

An attorney for the founder of Project Veritas has accused the Department of Justice of tipping off the New York Times about recent raids on current and former employees, while suggesting federal prosecutors may have also leaked the group’s legal communications.

Project Veritas, the conservative activist group founded by James O’Keefe, has come under federal scrutiny in relation to the alleged theft of the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley, which the group considered publishing but never did.

The FBI conducted raids at O’Keefe’s New York home and those of others connected to Project Veritas, seizing O’Keefe’s cell phone among other items.

On Thursday, the New York Times published a report based on memos from the group’s lawyer, revealing his legal advice on the group’s use of false identities and undercover filming, tactics that are eschewed by most modern journalists.

O’Keefe’s attorney Harmeet Dhillon in an interview on Thursday night slammed the report as a ‘hit piece’ and questioned whether the DOJ had leaked the legal memos to the Times, an extraordinary and possibly illegal step.

‘I can’t say how the New York Times got this information, but they got it in a way that is illegal and unethical,’ Dhillon told Fox News.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/julio-rivera/2021/11/11/selective-media-mutes-coverage-of-violent-attack-against-interior-department-n1531826

It seems like ever since January 6th of this year, after the unfortunate protests against the certification of last November’s presidential election, all some media outlets have wanted to talk about is, well, January 6th.

On Democratically controlled Capitol Hill, we’ve already seen the formation of a select committee that is more interested in the effort to “investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex” than in examining the series of events that caused many Americans to feel that the election results were deserving of additional scrutiny.

Members of this so-called “January 6th committee” are now reportedly working on potential legislation to modify the 134-year-old Electoral Count Act, in what they claim is an effort to ensure that a losing party can never subvert the results of a presidential election, while clearly ignoring the volumes of evidence displaying the rampant irregularities associated with the last election.

So, while this political theater continues to play out, one recent event that invoked similar imagery and disorder to January 6th continues to completely fly under the radar — the siege against the Interior Department by climate change activists just weeks ago. 

https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/ny-times-latest-bid-to-double-down-on-rewriting-us-history/

Some people just don’t take correction well. The New York Times Magazine was rebuked two summers ago for the 1619 Project, an essay collection that proposed, as the Times itself announced, “to reframe American history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Now the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, has doubled down on that in a new piece this week.

From the outset, the idea was not simply to broaden our understanding of America’s founding and history, but to replace it.

That was always wrong. America was not unique because of slavery, which predates recorded history and existed all around the world well after 1776. Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, Egyptians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Turks, Arabs and many African societies had slaves. The word “slave” derives from “Slav.” In the century after Columbus, more Russian slaves were carried across the Black Sea to the Ottoman Empire than African slaves across the Atlantic.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was around half of the slave trade out of Africa, and at least 90 percent of that trade went to places outside the United States. The Spanish brought African slaves to Georgia and Florida nearly a century before 1619, and into the 1640s, there were more British slaves held in Africa than African slaves held in British colonies.

What made America unique was its democratic system of limited government and its ideals of individual rights — both of which started in Virginia in 1619 with the first elected legislature in the Western Hemisphere. From the beginning, America struggled with the fact that slavery did not conform with the ideals of the Bill of Rights, and ultimately fought a Civil War over it in which hundreds of thousands died to free 4 million black Americans.

The 1619 Project had more specific problems. Its organizer and lead essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, claimed without evidence that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” She waved off warnings from the historian reviewing this claim before publication. Under a barrage of criticism from a Who’s Who of leading academic historians, the Times first wrote a lengthy defense and later grudgingly reworded this, but both Hannah-Jones and Silverstein refuse to call this a “correction.” They also quietly deleted the reference to “1619 as our true founding.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/maybe-its-time-the-washington-post-and-the-new-york-times-return-those-russian-collusion-pulitzers

Did you know there’s a process whereby an undeserved Pulitzer Prize may be returned?

Disgraced former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke in 1981 returned hers after it was discovered she fabricated the feature story that won her the award in the first place.

It’s worth revisiting this factoid this week with the news the primary source for the infamous Steele Dossier, which launched two solid years of white-knuckled award-winning Russian collusion news coverage, has been indicted on five counts of lying to federal investigators about how and where he got his supposed information.

Igor Danchenko is accused of making several significant false claims, one of the biggest being he was informed of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Moscow and the Trump 2016 campaign by a man federal authorities identify only as the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

The federal indictment plainly accuses Danchenko of contributing multiple exaggerations, rumors, and flat-out lies to the Steele Dossier. The indictment also alleges Danchenko received a good deal of his supposed information from a longtime Democratic Party operative with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign instead of actual intelligence experts with keen and relevant knowledge regarding the Kremlin’s inner workings. Danchenko told federal investigators he did not receive certain information from a Democratic operative. Federal authorities say this is a lie. The indictment likewise hints at the possibility Danchenko worked recently for a Russian intelligence agency.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/rachel-maddows-shocking-new-low

Yesterday, Special Counsel John Durham indicted Brookings Institute analyst Igor Danchenko, better known as the primary source for Christopher Steele, the ex-spy who compiled the now-infamous “Steele Dossier” on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. The case has implications for higher-ranking figures, but the indictment is most immediately devastating to the reputation of the many famous news personalities who hyped the Steele story. They almost all look terrible today, but the response by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was a thing beyond. Whatever the category below “disgraced journalist” is, she entered it with gusto with last night’s performance.

Much of the indictment concerns false statements Danchenko allegedly made to the FBI concerning his interactions with “PR Executive-1,” described as a “U.S.-based individual… who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics and was then an executive at a U.S. public relations firm.” New York Times reporter Charlie Savage received confirmation from the lawyer of a man named Charles Dolan that Dolan is, in fact, the executive:

Charlie Savage @charlie_savage
MORE: A lawyer for Charles Dolan, a public relations executive with a long history of ties to the Democratic Party, confirms his client is the person identified as “PR Executive-1” in the indictment. Updating story shortly.

Russiagate is already a sizable boil on the face of American journalism, but the indictment of Danchenko has the potential to grow the profession’s embarrassment to fantastic dimensions. For instance, a key claim of the Steele dossier involved a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Russia that supposedly went back years, and was managed on the Trump side by Paul Manafort and Carter Page. At one point, it was believed this claim was sourced to an anonymous phone call Danchenko thought came from the former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, Sergei Millian. Danchenko moreover reportedly told the FBI that he and the “anonymous caller” made an appointment to meet in New York.

The indictment, however, asserts that Danchenko never even spoke to Millian, repeatedly emailing him and getting no response. As for that trip to New York, hoo boy:

From on about July 26, 2016 through July 28, 2016, DANCHENKO traveled to New York with a family member. On or about July 28, 2016, DANCHENKO visited, among other places, the Bronx Zoo with the family member. During this trip, DANCHENKO did not meet or communicate with Chamber President-I.

It’s bad enough that the “well-developed” conspiracy tale appears to have been sourced to a graduate of the Jayson Blair school of investigation, who was strolling in the Bronx Zoo during the time when he was supposedly landing the scoop of a lifetime (note that Steele himself reportedly believed the pee tape was sourced, “in part,” to Millian).

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-journalism-abandoned-the-working

If you read this newsletter you are acutely aware of the transformation of the mainstream media over the last decade and, especially, over the past couple of years. But few have offered a fully satisfying answer to the question of why. 

Why is it, for example, that between 2013 and 2019, the frequency of the words “white” and “racial privilege” exploded by 1,200 percent in The New York Times and by 1,500 percent in The Washington Post? Why was the term “white supremacy” used 2,400 times by National Public Radio in 2020?

What changed? Why was there suddenly a relentless focus on race and power? And who—or what—was driving it?

At last those questions have been answered with unusual clarity by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book “Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.” 

Batya, who is an opinion editor at Newsweek, is hard to pin down politically. I first met her in 2018 and I would have described her then as woke. These days I’d call her a left-wing populist. (She’s part of an endangered species: a person willing to change her mind.) But what I appreciate most about Batya, and what I think you’ll find when you read the essay below, is someone who is able to put ideology aside and pursue to illuminate why the news is broken, how it is fueling one war (culture) to distract from another (class), and how that might be changed. — BW