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MEDIA

Everywhere, Cancel The View. Now. It’s reductive, boring, and serves no higher purpose than to fill the pockets and fuel the egos of those involved, at the expense of women. Kay Smythe

https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/02/22/smythe-for-the-sake-of-women-everywhere-cancel-the-view-now/

ABC’s suspension of Whoopi Goldberg for her Holocaust rant was labeled “cancel culture” by her leftist bedfellows. It may be true, but I don’t think ABC went far enough. I think The View should be cancelled in its entirety.

Goldberg, whose real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson (she gave herself a Jewish last name), had denied that the Holocaust was a racially-driven genocide. The comments were especially galling given her bizarre history with Judaism.

In May 2011 she told a crowd: “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays. Religion is a lot of work, it’s exhausting. So I keep it simple, I have a pretty good relationship with God. We talk.’”

Speaking about her name change, she opined: “The name is wonderful for starting conversations.” The Jewish Chronicle reported that her mother, “Emma Johnson, thought that the family’s original surname was ‘not Jewish enough’ for her daughter to become a star.”

Perhaps even more repulsively, Goldberg has defended Bill Cosby (who poisoned and raped women and girls), even after he admitted giving women quaaludes without their consent. Goldberg is not a woman who supports others, and neither are her co-panelists on The View.

The Media is the Massage Tony Thomas *****

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2022/02/the-media-is-the-massage/

Why is the media so mistrusted? That’s not a question much raised at journalism schools or debated on the ABC’s The Drum. The mistrust is because the left-leaning media dispenses such muck that only fools give it any credibility. Read on and I’ll document that statement– understatement, really — using as case studies the giant global news wholesalers such as Agence France Press (AFP) and Associated Press (AP), and the New York Times, flagship of America’s progressive newspapers.

In Australia reporters are the second-least trusted of 30 occupations, ahead of politicians but behind delivery drivers. That’s according to a Readers Digest poll last year. Among 46 countries, the US media is the least trusted (29 per cent), according to a Reuters Institute poll last year. Australians who trust the media were 43 per cent, which is less than in Poland, Croatia and South Africa. Within the US, last October’s Gallup Poll assessed trust in media at 36 per cent, the second-lowest on record. Only 11 per cent of Republicans – who comprise half the population – trust the media, and only 10 per cent of Americans trust the media’s reporting on COVID.[1]

The normal focus is on mastheads like the New York Times and Washington Post – and here The Australian, Age and Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). But such a narrow focus detracts from the less obvious role of news wholesalers AFP, AP, Reuters and Bloomberg. Without them your morning paper or online bulletin would be half empty.

In days gone by the wire services’ watchword was political and ideological neutrality. Playing such a straight bat made them unremarkable. But now AFP, Reuters and Bloomberg have literally signed the climate pledge and partnered with 460 other media groups at Covering Climate Now (CCN). That “partnership” involves hyping warming and cancelling whatever doesn’t fit the narrative. And AP, in a jaw-dropping breach of journalistic ethics, this month began hiring 20 climate-crazed reporters using an $US8 million gift from five green/Left billionaire philanthropies. From now on we’ll be reading the best AP climate news that can be bought with activists’ money. Here’s a snapshot of the agencies’ reach:

AFP: This world’s oldest news wholesaler (186 years) has 1700 journalists operating in 150 countries. It’s independent but gets about 40% of its funding from French government subsidies.

Adam Andrzejewski : Forbes Bows to Pressure from NIH and cancels a column critical of Dr. Fauci!

In case you missed it – earlier this week I broke the news on Tucker Carlson Tonight that my Forbes column was terminated after the National Institutes of Health pressured the Forbes c-suite because of my oversight pieces on Fauci’s finances.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the most highly paid federal employee and the most visible. Therefore, we have an obligation to give him oversight.

And Forbes canceled my column.

Forbes was a key platform for nearly eight years. I published 206 oversight pieces and a quarter million words of investigation.

Watch our Tucker Carlson Tonight segment and read the Fox News digital story here:

Forbes Contributor Fired Over Investigative Stories On Fauci Tyler Durden’s Photo by Tyler Durden

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/forbes-contributor-fired-over-investigative-stories-fauci

Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com and a frequent guest contributor to Zero Hedge (who most certainly does not get his talking points from the KGB), and who was also – until very recently – a contributor to Forbes, told Tucker Carlson on Monday that he was terminated from the magazine over his coverage of NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Andrzejewski, who recently made headlines with his investigative reporting that Fauci was the highest paid employee in the entire US Federal government, described how he was targeted for being critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci and exposing his yearly earnings.

“The National Institutes of Health’s six top executives wrote an e-mail to myself and Randall Lane, the top content officer at Forbes. It was couched as a corrections e-mail, but there were no substantial corrections and they quibbled about small things in my column. But that was the excuse Forbes used to cancel it,” Andrzejewski said.

He explained that within 24 hours of the email, he received a call that told him he was barred from publishing any additional material regarding Fauci.

Andrzejewski originally filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Jan. 28, 2021 regarding Fauci’s annual pay. After receiving only redacted documents, his group OpenTheBooks.com filed suit on Oct. 25. This led to the National Institute of Health agreeing to release its extensive documents but only incrementally over the next 14 months due to backed-up requests.

DRUDGE IS DEAD

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/15/drudge-is-dead/

What exactly has happened to the formerly must-read Drudge Report?

It may seem like yesterday to old Washington hands, but it was actually more than a quarter-century ago that a manager of a gift shop in a television network building in greater Hollywood, a 20-something with a thirst for movie star gossip, signaled the end of the establishment media’s chokehold on the American public. He started an amateurishly formatted website featuring links to important but under-the-radar online articles, to go along with his own mysteriously obtained scoops.

It was, let us never forget, Matt Drudge who broke the Monica Lewinsky story that led to Bill Clinton’s presidential impeachment and Senate trial, only the second in American history. Shortly before Drudge dropped his bomb, in an exquisite self-indictment of media bias and protectiveness of Democrats in power, Newsweek, then a half-century-old journalistic institution whose huge Washington bureau was near the top of a high rise on Pennsylvania Avenue a half block from the White House, killed its exclusive story revealing the sex scandal. It had been the work of Michael Isikoff, a famously aggressive – and left-leaning – veteran Washington reporter.

Yet today, it is the Drudge Report that is Newsweek.

The Drudge Report might quaintly sport the same typeface it used in the early days of the Internet, but on Sunday and then all day and all evening Monday, a story of Lewinskyesque scale rocked the nation’s capital.

In a court submission last week, Special Counsel John Durham alleged, as Fox News put it, “that lawyers from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign … paid to access servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to federal government agencies linking then-President Trump to Russia.”

Durham, probably the most straight-shooting, apolitical lawyer in the federal government, now years into an exhaustive probe, revealed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign sought out both the FBI and the CIA in peddling lies that Trump was colluding with Russia, so as to get every news outlet it could to keep that false story at the top of the news during the 2016 campaign, and then, when that failed, to use it to cripple the Trump presidency.

The Media Blackout of Durham’s Bombshell Report Alleging Clinton Campaign ‘Infiltrated’ Trump Tower By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/02/13/the-media-blackout-of-durhams-bombshell-report-alleging-clinton-campaign-infiltrated-trump-tower-n1558817

A filing by special counsel John Durham — alleging Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a technology company to establish an “inference” that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia so she could win an election — has not generated much excitement in the mainstream media.

Perhaps because the story is somewhat complex, the media has decided not to report on it? Indeed, naming all the players and their actions is a chore, if you read the few media outlets on the right that are covering it.

It’s sort of boring — until you realize the staggering implications of what’s being alleged.

Durham is saying that the Democratic candidate for president in 2016 engaged in a criminal conspiracy to infiltrate the opposition’s most sensitive, compartmentalized information and tried to manipulate data and information to politically damage her opponent.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

CNN is full of stories about Donald Trump’s clogged toilet, but nothing about the Durham probe. The Washington Post is equally silent. As are The New York Times and the Associated Press.

Will these brave, courageous purveyors of truth cover the fact that Trump special prosecutor Robert Mueller was hoodwinked by these shenanigans? That Mueller was kept in the dark about the surveillance from which some of his “evidence” was obtained?

Donald Trump was livid.

Fox News:

Former President Trump reacted to the filing on Saturday evening, saying Durham’s filing “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.”

“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Trump said. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

Trump added: “In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.”

CNN’s collapse is now complete By Joe Concha

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.

Media Attack Investigative Reporter for Investigating and Reporting on CAIR By A. J. Caschetta

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.”

Why Do Media Ignore Biden Family’s Corruption?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/28/why-do-media-ignore-biden-familys-corruption/

It’s a curious thing: Obvious, credible signs about a prominent political family emerge, but federal authorities at the Justice Department and elsewhere do nothing. Meanwhile, leftist media “watchdogs,” in a classic case of gaslighting, pretend that nothing has happened.

So it is with Joe Biden and his errant son, Hunter.

A new book (“Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win“) by investigative researcher and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer makes a powerful case that the Biden family has profited handsomely from its cozy ties to China’s ruling Communist regime.

The book claims that, all in all, the Bidens raked in close to $31 million from deals in China with individuals having close ties to the Chinese government.

“In sum, each deal the Bidens secured in China was via a businessman with deep ties at the highest levels of Chinese intelligence. And in each case there appears to be little discernible business or professional service that was rendered in return for the money,” Schweizer notes.

Of particular interest is businessman Che Feng, dubbed “The Super Chairman,” by Hunter Biden. The younger Biden managed the Biden family interests while Joe remained active in politics.

As Breitbart describes him, “Che, the son of a PLA soldier, has been described in Western media as ‘a shadowy and discreet investor,’ whose father-in-law was the governor of the People’s Bank of China,” and whose business partner was the vice minister of State Security, a man by the name of Ma Jian.

Che, among the earliest of “contacts” for Hunter Biden and his partners, was key to the Bidens gaining access to the big-money deals with other influential Chinese “businessmen,” all of whom answer to Xi Jinping’s increasingly totalitarian communist regime. Indeed, Che was in effect the linchpin of the Biden network’s Chinese partners.

Eventually, partnering with a man named Henry Zhao, recommended by Che, Hunter Biden was able to forge an investment entity called Bohai Harvest RST. Though partly owned by the Bidens and their partners, Bohai received money from Chinese-government backed financial companies.

That troubling financial arrangement, Schweizer notes, “involved two financiers with ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, (and) a billion-dollar private equity deal.”

The problem with such “arrangements” is obvious.

Big Tech Thugs and Their Allies For the Left, censorship makes for a “healthier public conversation.” Larry Elder

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.”